TMI, a Taiwan-based early stage investment firm founded in 2012 by US venture firm WI Harper Group, Kaifu Lee, and ITRI, has just invested in three different startups.

• CitieSocial: It’s a hip social discovery site in Taiwan that mostly features designer items and gourmet food.
• Driving Curve: An iOS app that basically collects data on a user’s speed and fuel efficiency when driving, thus presumably improving their driving skills. Also, this startup is from Taiwan.
• PeerIdea: It’s currently not clear yet what this startup does.

I took a look at CitieSocial, and it’s pretty cool. I already found a pencil sharpener I really want to buy. The idea is pretty niche in that it’s all luxury and novelty products so it’ll entice users to come through and check out products that they wouldn’t find elsewhere in more obvious e-commerce sites that feature normal branded products. It currently has over 100,000 members, and more than 100 brand partners. It’s a bit like Fab.com and other so-called designer-to-consumer sites.

So far, Driving Curve has had humble beginnings with only 20,000+ downloads and is gaining popularity on the other side of the world in France. According to Lucas Wang, CEO of TMI:

TMI has had a keen interest in apps related to the auto sector. Driving Curve has an exceptional product and stylish UI design. Most importantly, the team is top-notch: focused, passionate and ambitious. We believe our cooperation has unlimited potential.”

Lastly, PeerIdea hasn’t revealed much about what the company does. We just know that it’s started by Weiting Liu, who was also behind SocialPicks, a social finance startup founded in 2009, and he also designed an app on the Facebook platform that got more than 10 million downloads. TMI’s clearly investing in the potential of the founder in this case.

We reached out to TMI for details on the numbers, but with seed capital for these nascent startups, you can be sure it’s under a million dollars, just enough for the companies to scale.

For more info on TMI, which was founded last year, check out our recent feature.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: TechCrunch)

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.

China’s newcomer phone-maker Xiaomi said a while back that it would make its first ever venture outside mainland China. And now Xiaomi has set dates and prices for upcoming launches in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

According to the now-online Xiaomi HK and TW sites, the recently launched Xiaomi Mi2S model (pictured) will launch in Hong Kong on April 23rd for HK$2,499 (US$322), which works out as the same price in mainland China. Over in Taiwan, the price will be a comparative TW$9,499 with a more vague sometime-in-May date set.

Xiaomi sells most of its Android-powered devices online, so the startup gadget-maker needs to tweak its e-commerce site for the new markets. The solution is accepting Paypal in both of the new territories. There’s no word yet on whether any Hong Kong or Taiwan telcos will carry the device in the same way that China Unicom and China Telecom has done on the mainland.

Xiaomi is aiming to sell 15 million phones in 2013, double its tally in 2012.

The full Amazon Appstore new line-up in Asia-Pacific – it has launched already in Japan – is here, with larger nations highlighted in bold:

• American Samoa
• Australia
• Bhutan
• Cambodia
• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Cook Islands
• French Polynesia
• Hong Kong
• India
• Laos
• Macao
• Mariana Islands
• Marshall Islands
• Micronesia
• Mongolia
• Myanmar
• Nepal
• New Zealand
• Niue
• Norfolk Island
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Philippines
• Samoa
• Solomon Islands
• South Korea
• Sri Lanka
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Timor-Leste
• Tokelau
• Tuvalu
• Vanuatu
• Vietnam
• Wallis and Futuna

With developers and customers in those countries now having access to Amazon’s catalog of apps, it might soon lead to the company’s hardware, namely the Kindle Fire and Fire HD tablets – going on sale there at a later date. But the Amazon App Store can be used on any Android device.

By the way, there are some seriously odd places on the global list, such as Antarctica, and the Heard Island and McDonald Island (Wikipedia says: “Population: 0”).

5945 is Taiwan’s up and coming online home repairs marketplace startup. The model is similar to America’s Redbeacon, which was acquired by Home Depot last year.

The name “5945” makes no sense to most folks. But it’s named to be hyper-localized for the Taiwan market. The pronunciation of 5945 sounds like the phrase “calling masters” in Taiwanese Hokkien, a dialect most people in Taiwan can speak or at least understand. In Taiwan, professionals like plumbers, electricians, and carpenters are called shifu – meaning “masters” in English.

The startup was founded in 2010 by computer science graduates Michael Chang and Brian Fang who are high school classmates. Both of them believe that repairmen wouldn’t know how to provide their services on the internet. Therefore, the duo created 5945 as a home services marketplace for people who don’t want to DIY to find them easily on the web. The Taiwanese startup was incubated by AppWorks in 2010 and was subsequently invested in 2012.

5945 has over 300 handymen who cover the majority of Taiwan, including Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung. To date, 5945 has received over 3,300 user requests for repairmen and generates over $67,000 worth of service sales for these professionals.

For 2013, the Taiwanese startup aims to launch mCall, a mobile application that will help connect these service people and users directly through mobile devices. 5945 claims that 60 percent of all home repair professionals are using smartphones. 5945 is also looking to break even this year.

I’ve written a lot recently about murders revolving around video games in China (i.e. this, this, this, and this), but the latest gruesome story comes from Taiwan, and it involves gamers being not so much horrifyingly violent as horrifyingly indifferent.

On April 3, an 18-year-old walked into an internet cafe in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and stabbed a man several years older than him to death with a watermelon knife. The crime was caught on the internet cafe’s surveillance camera, and nearly as concerning as the murder itself is the fact that none of the many bystanders in the internet cafe (you can see some of them in the image above, milling around immediately after the murder had been committed) attempted to stop it from happening. Even more extreme, one female gamer (that’s her in the top right in the image below) ignored the crime completely and continued to play games even through the crime happened so close to her that blood had splattered onto her clothes, according to eyewitnesses.

It’s hard to imagine what game could be so engrossing that you don’t want to quit even when blood is quite literally flying around you, and the Shenzhen Satellite TV station’s news report on the incident doesn’t report that or interview the girl directly.

(Shenzhen Satellite TV)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just last week, two Chinese nationals were arrested in Vietnam. They were found with a total of 7,200 SIM cards that they were using to scam people via an elaborate telephone fraud. At first, I didn’t think this was interesting news, until I did a little hunting and found out that there’s an entire international ring of these guys operating across Asia. And they’re constantly getting arrested.

In the past few months, hundreds of these scammers have been arrested who are mainly Chinese or Taiwanese. In January, 80 were arrested in Cambodia. Last August, 350 were arrested in the Philippines, and in December, 100 were arrested in Sri Lanka. 19 were also apprehended in Thailand and Myanmar and ZDNet estimates that a total of 482 people have been arrested as of last month. That doesn’t include the suspects that were just captured in Vietnam.

To say the least, it’s either a huge network of scammers or a relatively easy scam that can be replicated across nations.

So basically, the scam is this: the scammer calls someone responsible for a company’s finances claiming to be the police and asks them to transfer money into a “safe” account for holding and/or inspection. New SIMs are used each time so that they can’t be tracked and the scammers also seem to use a two-step process in which they use SIMs to make a VOIP call over the internet, thus making it even less trackable. After the money is transferred, it disappears, and the scammer is never heard from again.

It’s interesting that all of this has gone down in just the last few months, I wonder if we’ll start to see more of these arrests in the coming months as the network gets broken down.

(Source: ICT News)

Taiwanese mobile messaging app Cubie recently rolled out four additional languages — Indonesian, German, Italian, and Portuguese — making it available in a total of nine languages. Cubie says that growth in Asia is strong but it is also experiencing traction in Europe and South America. Besides Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia rank second and third in terms of popularity based on country. Saudi Arabia is fourth followed by the US.

The company currently has 6.5 million downloads and is monetizing by selling cutesy stickers to users. Cubie’s international messenger, James Hill, said that some of its premium stickers are selling quite well and the startup is currently also exploring other revenue streams.

For now, Cubie has no intention of becoming a platform like Line, KakaoTalk, or WeChat and is focusing its efforts within the chat room. Cubie differentiates from competing messaging apps with its SnapChat-like messaging feature for disappearing texts. The Taiwanese startup first struck me as a mobile messaging app that’s aimed at women, but as time passes it’s apparent that the app is proving popular with both genders.

Last month, we looked into how Cubie got featured on Google Play which helped drive 50,000 downloads each day. Cubie last raised $1.1 million from a group of investors, including B Dash Ventures, NTT Investment Partners, Gumi Ventures, and 500 Startups.

China’s top e-commerce player, Alibaba, also runs the nation’s leading daily deals site. Run under the familiar Taobao brand name and URL as Juhuasuan, the site is today expanding to include customers and daily deals in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Centered around a new overseas site at hk.ju.taobao.com, the number of offers right now is very limited, but that will expand over time. The main Juhuasuan deals site has several thousand product listings at any given time, so it might be a while before relevant deals are made available to new users in Hong Kong and Taiwan. (UPDATED the stat about product listings to correct a mistake).

This new version of Juhuasuan will focus on deals for things like clothing, homeware, mother and baby products, consumer electronic accessories, and children’s toys. Travel and “lifestyle” deals will appear in a few weeks’ time, though it’s not clear if that will cover food/restaurants. But it will be an interesting challenge to Groupon in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The new site has ‘traditional’ Chinese characters, which is the script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Just last week we were talking to Daphne Lee, the director of Taobao international business, who told us how Alibaba is keen to expand its various e-commerce offerings to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and across Southeast Asia, though there’s no word yet of the whole site being made available in English or other languages.

In today’s announcement, Daphne said:

[W]e firmly believe will enhance and complement the online shopping experience at Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com for our more-than two million registered users in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2012, we continued to improve upon platform infrastructure and introduced new features such as the Alipay Card to make online shopping more convenient for Hong Kong and Taiwan consumers. Users can expect an even more diverse and comprehensive set of new and localized features and services to be rolled out in 2013.

This is the second consumer-oriented Alibaba site to venture overseas after the afore-mentioned expansion of the C2C Taobao shopping site. The Juhuasuan overseas service is promising delivery of its items in one or two days. For travel and lifestyle deals, QR codes or serial numbers will be employed so that shoppers can collect their deal from a retailer.

In our most recent daily deals industry stats, Taobao Juhuasuan has 47.8 percent market share by revenue – that’s way ahead of the indie Groupon clone Meituan with 13.1 percent share.

Zhang Moujun, a 27-year-old employee at a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, doesn’t sleep very well, so like many others who suffer insomnia, he takes sleeping pills. He told Southern Metropolis Daily that on the night of April 2, he popped a couple extra ones because the regular dosage wasn’t working. Unfortunately, a friend saw him doing it, and reported to the company that he seemed to attempting suicide. He was taken to the hospital where his stomach was pumped. Then, the next day, he was fired.

The termination notice Zhang says he was given by Foxconn reads:

While at work, [Zhang] exhibited the following behaviors or facts: threatening the company, disturbing the normal management of the company.

When contacted by the Southern Metropolis Daily, a Foxconn representative said that the company could not confirm or deny Zhang’s story because the relevant people are on vacation for the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday.

Foxconn (which manufactures Apple and much of the rest of the tech world’s gadgets) has long been dogged by reports of employee suicide. Back in 2010 the company suffered a rash of suicides that brought the company into the public eye. More recently, last week the company was forced to deny rumors of yet another jumping suicide attempt after a report claimed that a female employee had jumped off the roof following a dispute at the company’s Shenzhen complex.

Given that, a cynic might be inclined to suspect that the company is intentionally firing employees who are thought to be considering or have attempted suicide to save itself the bad press. After all, whether or not Zhang really was trying to kill himself, it’s hard to see how that amounts to “threatening the company.” Moreover, it seems like if the company really believed Zhang was depressed enough to be suicidal, firing him is probably not the best way to improve his state of mind.

It will be interesting to see what Foxconn says about this case once the company is back up and running after the break. But if the cynical interpretation of Zhang’s firing proves true, it could cast doubts about whether or not the company has really improved things for workers at all. Perhaps it has just been firing depressed and disgruntled employees before they get a chance to act. I hope that is not the case.

(Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech)

#13:59: Kee Lock has nurtured two billion-dollar companies, so our guest interviewer, Darius Cheung, asks how to build a billion-dollar business. Kee Lock says there are invisible barriers to entry and difficulties, but there are opportunities all across the world to do that. In terms of success factors, he says that it’s all down to the entrepreneur and the staff. Then, the ability to change enough to adapt to shifting markets and technologies. “Ultimately, it’s all about the team”.

#14:05: Regulations are often the biggest barriers, he says. Telcos are an example of where regulations and high prices – previously $1 per minute for SG-US phonecalls – inspire innovations. That’s part of the story behind Kee’s MediaRing business.

#14:08: But he admits to mistakes with MediaRing, like when it ditched PC-to-PC calling. That perhaps caused MediaRing to lose out to Skype. He and his team listened to analysts, Kee says, rather than listeners.

#14:12: However, it’s not really about money – the startup is about a bond among the team, “about building something great” and keeping the right startup culture.

#14:13: What are his favorite portfolio startups? Kee first points out that the VC task his hard – he has to be a sort of fortune-teller. Even after two or three years, he can’t be sure how the startup is performing and new challenges always emerge. So, no names named.

#14:14: Is there a series A crunch in Asia, as hype seems to suggest. He says that NRF does a great job to give funding and often gives around $1 million, which takes them up to the next level. But, for the next levels, you’re talking ten-million-plus levels, taking you to needing $50 million or more in funding for major expansion and capital-heavy work. He concedes that late-stage funding is tougher to find, as well as medium-stage startups. He calls that “the valley of death” where the company is operating well but has no money to scale. That’s sad, he says.

#14:20: Vertex has put three rounds of funding into Reebonz, the luxury flash sales site. At first he called it “a stupid company” but then saw the virtue in it, and at first Reebonz addressed Singapore and Malaysia well. That’s when the first input came.

#14:24: Reebonz is also a good example of keeping ahead of the competition, Kee says. It’s a bit like martial art Tai Qi. It seems easy to copy, but it’s very hard to master.

#14:27: There are still more startup opportunities in social and other areas. Though Vertex tends not to invest in that area.

#14:29: Which leads Kee back to the hardest part of the job: seeing trends. That requires a mix of objective and subjective – data and feelings about the market and where it’s heading. Look for opportunities in growth areas. Like Vertex looking into mobile components and smartphone usage grows.

#14:31: Vertex invests in six, seven, or eight startups per year. Typically mostly in China. Hopefully, he says, in Indonesia soon – but not yet.

#14:32: Vertex does co-invest, he says, in response to an audience question. In terms of startups themselves, he looks for those in the business for the long-haul.

#14:33: “A good entrepreneur needs to be arrogant – but also listen.” That’s hard to do. The arrogance is mainly confidence, he says, which is needed in the industry.

#14:39: What drives you, Darius asks? Kee Lock says that it’s possible to create great companies if you’re passionate. He points out that Singapore Airlines didn’t exist 35 minutes ago. It’s the same in sport: whoever wants to win will stand out from those who don’t want to lose. But those striving to win will succeed in the end. “We need more want-to-win companies”.

#14:41: Thanks for following the live blog.

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

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our original speaker, Le Hong Minh is unable to attend the conference. But we’re fortunate and honored to have  Jamie Lin, founding partner of appWorks Ventures to speak on the Taiwanese startup scene.

#10:35: Jamie: On building appWorks, Jamie had this in mind: what kind of resource would I want my VCs to bring to the table?

#10:38: Jamie: appWorks has both incubator and accelerator programs. During each batch they will incubate for six months, and then do business development for them. They will then link them up with suitable investors. Think of them as early stage investors. They see themselves as VC built for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.

#10:40: Willis: What are the interesting startups in Taiwan?

#10:41: Jamie: Gamesofa is one, and was generating US$30 million per year.

#10:43 Willis: Who are the more popular investors in Taiwan?

For the past ten years, the VC industry is not growing much. We have around 120 GPs, 200 LPs in Taiwan.

#10:44: Willis: Biggest challenge facing entrepreneurs in Taiwan

#10:45: Jamie: The government. The people are lamenting that they should be more like Singapore. For instance, it is very difficult in Taiwanese corporate structure to give shared equity.

#10:46: Jamie: Second problem is that there is no third party online payment service like PayPal.

#10:47: Jamie: Third problem is Wimax adoption VS 4G LTE.

#10:50: Willis: What are the possible trends to ride on in Taiwan?

#10:51: Jamie: Smartphone penetration. Taiwan has around 50 percent smartphone adoption rate. And the ratio of the number of iOS devices to Androids is 1:3.

With this smartphone trend, gaming becomes huge. From the growth of smartphones, gaming can ride on this trend. It is about US$1 to 2 billion market we are looking at.

#10:52: Jamie: For entrepreneurs looking at Taiwan, e-commerce in Taiwan is really good. It is a good environment and platform.

#10:54: Jamie: In Taiwan, Jiaotong University is known to produce the most entrepreneurs. If you are looking to hire good quality engineers, you can look at Tsinghua University. Taida is known for business talents.

#10:56: Jamie: Taiwan, compared to US, is a small place. 90 percent of the more successful startups are in Taipei.

#10:57: Willis: Is it normal for Taiwanese companies to expand into China?

#10:58: Jamie: China is seemingly easier for Taiwanese startups to enter. But the cost of doing business in China is increasing at 20 – 30%, increasing the barriers to entry. It is typically not a move for Taiwanese companies to move into China. Expanding into SEA is relatively easier.

#10:59: Jamie: Doing business in China is really different. What is being said could mean something else. In Taiwan, people start off with a whitelist of companies to work with, whereas the in China, it is usually assumed that companies are bad (they start with a blacklist of companies), and slowly work their way to become a whitelist of companies.

#11:02: Willis: Why would Taiwanese choose SEA market, when it is so fragmented?

#11:03: Jamie: The GDP growth for a lot of SEA countries are actually much higher than China. It presents a good deal of opportunities and challenges for Taiwanese entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are very eager to learn about the region, in fact.

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

Taobao is a household name in China, being the online marketplace that first got the country going nuts for e-commerce. But Alibaba-owned Taobao is not necessarily confined to mainland China, and it’s definitely an area we want to explore more.

That’s why our upcoming Startup Asia Singapore 2013 will feature a coffee chat session on the topic ‘How E-Commerce King Taobao Is Expanding Out of China’. Shedding light on Taobao’s moves across Southeast Asia will be Daphne Lee, who’s responsible for managing Taobao’s business development and marketing strategies outside of home turf. That covers significant expansion into Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even Singapore.

Indeed, Daphne tells us that, as of the end of 2012, Taobao has 1.2 million registered members in Hong Kong and 600,000 in Taiwan. That’s a fairly good start – as well as cause for concern for other C2C marketplaces in the region. Could the Chinese e-commerce giant be heading into new areas, like taking on Kaskus in Indonesia? I’ll be sure to ask Daphne when she’s onstage for our chat at 2:30 to 3pm on April 5.

With lots of online shopping startups at the event, and Rakuten’s Asia-wide marketing officer onstage the day before, we’ll be firing hot-button e-commerce questions from all angles.

If you haven’t grabbed your tickets, do so today. Check out all the superb participants and guest speakers who’ll be there as well. See you at Startup Asia Singapore on April 4 and 5.

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

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

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

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

Duable Chinese, a US/Taiwan based startup, doesn’t want to send you into the labyrinth alone. It’s a web app, a Chinese reading interface that feeds you selected reading material synced to your proficiency level. Now accepting pre-orders for monthly subscriptions, they hope to release their first prototype in April 2013. Co-founder Nikolaas Van Der Ploeg, speaking to me in Singapore, says:

We’re selecting interesting blog posts, news reports, even some playful fan-fiction, so you get both a fun and relevant reading experience.

Users take an initial test to determine their proficiency levels, and the app then sends you articles based on your subjects of interest (music, technology, fiction among others). “Our main focus right now is on users with intermediate proficiency,” Van der Ploeg says. “We’ll monitor words that people click on or phrases they’re having trouble with, and we can track progress that way.”

Think of it as a cross between TheChineseReader and the Zhongwen plugin for Chrome, with analytics churning underneath and a personalized recommendation engine on top.

Started in October 2012, Duable’s co-founders Van Der Ploeg, an American computer programmer based in Taiwan, and Victor Chen, an American-born Taiwanese, have been trawling for sources and churning our prototypes. They’ve just received S$ 25,000 in seed funding from Singapore’s Jungle Frog Digital Incubator, and are part of JFDI’s 2013 accelerator program.

Duable’s revenue model is centered on monthly subscriptions, but Chen and Van der Ploeg are also reaching out to schools and teachers, who can then integrate their curriculum into the Duable interface. Van der Ploeg says:

We’re focused on our initial release now but in the future, we could even consider multiple languages.

They have a limited pre-release sale on till the end of February, with monthly subscriptions starting at US$14.99.

The relatively new Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi teased a possible expansion into Hong Kong and Taiwan a while back – and now we finally have a date for Xiaomi’s first ‘overseas’ push. Xiaomi team member Li Wanqiang posted to his 1.25 million fans on Sina Weibo over the weekend that the startup company “will begin sales in April in Hong Kong and Taiwan.”

Xiaomi sells a strippd-down line-up of just two Android-based phones, the flagship quad-core Mi2, and its revamped first-ever phone, the dual-core 1S. It’s rumored that the Xiaomi Mi2 will sell for HK$1,999 (US$257) in Hong Kong, but it’s somewhat unrealistic that it would be at such a price-tag, which would make it slightly cheaper than its already barely profitable mainland Chinese price.

Confirmed: An April launch.

Xiaomi revealed last month that it sold 7.19 million phones in mainland China in 2012. After selling in Hong Kong and Taiwan (probably via its preferred e-commerce channels, as well as one or two telco tie-ups), the Beijing company is contemplating launching in North America in 2014 or 2015.

(See: Founder Lei Jun Talks About Xiaomi, China’s Disruptive Phone-Maker)

The young phone-maker already has a Facebook page where it’s posting in traditional Chinese – the script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan – and has garnered 15,000 likes so far.

We contacted Xiaomi, but no further details about the April launch can be revealed.

(Spotted via: BuyBuyChina, Netease Mobile – article in Chinese)

Opera is working with Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek (TPE:2454) to integrate the Opera TV Store (pictured) within its chips. Manufacturers who use MediaTek chipsets — be it TVs, set-top boxes, or media players — will be able to make use of web content provided by the Opera TV Store.

Opera (OSE:OPERA) tells us that so far there are approximately 140 HTML5-based apps on its ‘smart TV’-oriented web marketplace: “The number of apps in the Opera TV Store is continuously growing, and will depend on OEM, launch region, and hardware capabilities.”

Apps that are available on the Opera TV Store include those by the Associate Press News, Facebook, Tunein Radio, Twitter, and Vimeo. Opera couldn’t comment on how many MediaTek-powered smart TVs or boxes it expects to sell this year. But so far, the Opera TV Store is already available on the popular Sony Bravia TVs and blu-ray DVD players.

As we saw last summer, smart TVs were most popular in Japan and China in 2012 among Asian nations.

Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera, commented in today’s announcement:

Implementing the Opera TV Store in MediaTek’s smart TV solution will help to move smart TVs from being a novelty to the mainstream. Millions of app-hungry users will be able to enjoy a comfortable, ‘leanback’ experience on their TVs.

On a peaceful and lazy Saturday afternoon, beauty box subscription commerce startup VanityTrove announced that it has acquired Glossybox in Taiwan, a company part of Rocket Internet. The CEO of VanityTrove Taiwan turns out to be Sanjay Shivkumar, the dude behind the Summon Auntie mobile app. How both of them met and came to collaborate is a mystery. But I do know that Sanjay has been in Taiwan for quite some time now.

When asked about subscriber numbers, Douglas Gan, founder of VanityTrove, declined to reveal exact figures. But he did say that it now has “a few thousand” subscribers. After the acquisition, the top three countries in terms of subscribers are Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand. On current team size, Douglas told me:

We have a physical office setup with at least five staff per country in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Thailand. Total staff strength is almost 40 in the region.

Clearly, Vietnam is missing in the list. Douglas commented that Vietnam does have potential but said that five countries are more than enough to handle for this year.

In related news, the Australian beauty box subscription commerce startup Bellabox recently announced its latest financing round of $1.37 million.

With a team of 40, and to stay competitive, I’m willing to bet my cupcakes (or brownies) that VanityTrove is likely to raise a financing round very soon!

Plurk has been around since 2008 as a social network that works like Twitter. It has proved popular in Asia – so much so that the team moved from Toronto, Canada to set up shop in Taiwan. Today Plurk is revealing that it has secured series A funding from WI Harper, but the investment amount hasn’t been disclosed. It will be used to expand its reach into more countries.

Currently, its users are posting three million ‘plurks’ every day, and the company reckons that active users are posting 15 times each day. Plurk emphasizes anonymity, going so far as to describe itself as “a pseudonym-based social network.” Indeed, the funding will partly go towards the launch of something called Anonymous Plurking, which will “allow users to post anonymous content to their friends’ timeline.” That sounds like an odd feature, and we’ve reached out to the Plurk team to find out more about it. Ultimately, Plurk positions itself as “a highly sticky social network that values user privacy over friend discovery.”

When we last chatted with Plurk co-founder Alvin Woon, he remarked on the site’s popularity in Southeast Asia by saying: “We are not focusing on any specific part of the world per se. It just so happens that we have more users here, so we care a lot about the feedback that we get from them.”

Though the user interface is not the best (pictured below) and will look very cluttered and awkward to some people, it was clearly good enough for Microsoft China to copy, as happened in one notorious incident way back in 2009.

The painfully cluttered Plurk UI. This is a random user’s profile page featuring the horizontal timeline up top.

Aside from focusing on anonymity and privacy, Plurk is working on packaging the hive-mind content curation that its users do in the form of links, photos, and opinions. A bit like Reddit. In today’s announcement, Alvin says:

We want to build not only a great community, but also a new kind of social destination that approaches human connection differently. Our users value privacy more than users of other social networks. We don’t use real names. We talk funny. We are easily amused and at times, easily offended. I have given up hope trying to figure this community out. But we will always strive to provide the environment needed for the community to grow and sustain itself.

WI Harper partner Edward Liu doesn’t give any clue about monetization, but he stresses content curation and says that Plurk “has enjoyed strong growth in countries like Taiwan, Japan and Southeast Asia” recently.

• Line has 41.5 million registered users in Japan – This is the one which stands out the most to me, because given that recent estimates put Japanese entire population of smartphone users at around 40 million as well ¹, it means that Line is pretty close to being a ubiquitous mobile application in the country.
• 12.3 million users in Thailand, and 11.8 million users in Taiwan — both surprisingly high numbers!
• Reached 100 million users in just 19 months – This is faster than Twitter (49 months) and Facebook (54 months).

And while those numbers are impressive enough on their own, the application’s potential as a gaming platform is equally stunning. Yesterday we pointed out that its recent games Line Pop and Line Bubble have reached 20 million and 10 million users respectively, thanks to NHN Japan being able to distribute them so easily via its chat app platform.

China’s Xiaomi not only makes a range of popular Android-based smartphones (a whopping 7.19 million sold in 2012) but also its own group messaging app. Called Miliao in Chinese (and now with the English name MiTalk), it’s a smaller rival to WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, Whatsapp, and many others. Now MiTalk will be pushed across Southeast Asia thanks to a new partnership between the phone-maker and Taiwanese startup Mface.

According to QQ Tech today (via TheNextWeb), MiTalk is now up to 23 million registered users, although I’d suspect that the vast majority of those are in mainland China. Mface will help promote and distribute the chat app – even though it has a slight overlap of features with his own startup’s Path-like app – in Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan with the aim of MiTalk reaching five million overseas users by the end of the year.

We know that Xiaomi will launch its phones in Hong Kong and Taiwan soon – the first official sales channels outside of mainland China – so MiTalk is clearly going to be a part of that expansion. Xiaomi expects to sell 10 million smartphones in 2013, and is considering launching in North America in 2014 or 2015.

(Image: QQ Tech)

MiTalk faces a buzz of talkative competition from WeChat and its 300 million users, and aggressive overseas user acquisition from NHN Japan’s Line app, which crossed 100 million users last week.

(Source: QQ Tech – article in Chinese)

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures has had a Taiwan office for well over a year, and now the VC firm has yet another local site on its portfolio. This morning CyberAgent Ventures revealed its investment in Fashionguide, which it calls Taiwan’s largest beauty and cosmetics-oriented social networking service, but no funding sum was disclosed.

Fashionguide is essentially a socially-equipped clothing and make-up portal that has a mix of news and lots of user-submitted product reviews and enthusiast fashion blogs. CyberAgent Ventures’ Catherine Chang explains to TechinAsia that Fashionguide, although it looks fresh, has been around since 1997 and is one of Taiwan’s top 100 sites by Alexa’s rankings, with millions of monthly unique visitors.

The fashion site will use the funding, according to today’s announcement, to launch a flurry of new sections and services “targeting related women’s lifestyle categories” such as catalog shopping and hair design. The biggest boost will go to the recently launched ‘Ai Piao Liang‘ (literally “Love Beauty”) feature, which is a Pinterest-like social network for fashion and accessories. The hope of the CyberAgent VC office in Taiwan is that Fashionguide can “become the leading women’s lifestyle portal in Taiwan.”

Catherine tells us that the social portal has no current plans for expansion outside of the island. Fashionguide did venture into mainland China a few years ago but “found that market difficult to monetize.” So the focus will remain on Taiwan “where ARPU is higher.” The site monetizes with a mix of advertising and referral links, just as we’ve seen with Meilishuo in China.

CyberAgent Ventures’ last funding round was in the Taiwanese social recipes startup iCook.

Today’s announcement details that the Fashionguide investment “was made through CA-JAIC China Internet Fund II, which is jointly managed by CyberAgent Ventures and Japan Asia Investment Co.”

When Taiwanese media discovered that HTC was using student interns as laborers and accused it of basically running sweatshops (a charge HTC is not wholly unfamiliar with), the company responded that it was all part of a government-approved internship program. But, legal or no, HTC is reportedly saving around $15 million on wages by ‘employing’ student interns in some jobs instead of proper workers.

This trend is bad for workers, and I suspect it’s also pretty bad for students. Aside from a few avenues of study at technical colleges, it’s difficult for me to imagine how spending hours on an assembly line provides skills that are in any way relevant to students’ chosen fields. HTC says that the curriculum was designed by HTC, its partners, and the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, but I wonder how much say in the matter students had.

This isn’t just a tech industry phenomenon, either. Forced internships are common in many industries in China (I’m not sure about Taiwan) because they are good for the schools (which get kickbacks for providing cheap labor) and the factories (which get cheap labor). They’re bad for the students, of course, but the students have no power to change anything, and most are told that if they do not complete their internship they will not receive a degree.

It’s a really unsettling system of exploitation, and I hope that companies like HTC and the many companies Foxconn serves will step in to abolish it. Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I wouldn’t mind paying a few extra dollars for my electronic gadgets if that meant I could feel confident they were built by voluntarily employed workers paid a fair wage, and not forced student interns making a pittance.

(image source)

Line advertised on a train in Taiwan

It was a pretty big year for NHN Japan and its Line chat application in 2012. And according to a Taiwanese news report, the company plans to be equally ambitious this year as well. Focus Taiwan cites NHN representatives as saying that the company is targeting 300 to 400 million users by year’s end.

That would be a truly stunning figure for a service that only launched back in mid-2011. The report quotes Kang Hyun-bin, the head of Line business at NHN Corp in South Korea as saying that the chat app is expected to pass 100 million users this month.

In Taiwan specifically, Line has more than 10 million users, and Kang noted that NHN could open a branch office there soon. As we noted last week, NHN has gone so far as to advertise on trains in Taiwan, with QR codes displayed inside train cars so passengers can read and receive events from the application.

NHN’s lofty goal of 300 to 400 million users would put it into a stratosphere where only a few social giants have gone before. While user numbers for all social networks can be tricky to get a handle on, only Facebook, Twitter, Qzone, Google+, and Sina Weibo are playing at that level ¹.

Similarly, another Japanese social player also expressed ambitions to take his company to such a level. GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka said back in 2011 that he hoped his social games company could one day hit between 500 million and a billion users. The social gaming giant, recently launched a test version of its own chat application, ostensibly in an effort to keep up with the meteoric rise of Line, which has been successfully using chat as a games distribution platform.

Piling on the clues, the image features a map of Hong Kong in silhouette, and has the Bauhinia flower (as appears on the Hong Kong flag), so those are massive clues that suggest this is related to Hong Kong. In case the tweet gets deleted, I’ll post a screenshot:

We reached out to a Xiaomi representative in Beijing, but the team could not comment on this.

When we talked to Xiaomi founder and serial entrepreneur Lei Jun a few months ago, he did reveal that the phone-maker was looking to expand to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the near future.

Then, at the GMIC Silicon Valley conference, Lei expanded on what he told us to pin-point Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even Singapore as targets for online sales by the end of the year.

The new Xiaomi Mi2, a quad-core Android smartphone that costs only 1,999 RMB (US$318), looks set to replicate the success of the first-ever phone the company made. The device is sold in batches, partly to generate hype as it repeatedly sells out, though also to alleviate the fact that it’s struggling to manufacture the phone in sufficient numbers at a time when giant manufacturers like Samsung dominate the supply-chain of key components from smaller suppliers. If Xiaomi is indeed launching in Hong Kong and/or Taiwan, then it must be confident that it has enough stock to ship to these markets – despite their small size.

Rival Meizu has its own brick-and-mortar store in Hong Kong, which opened at the very end of last year. But Xiaomi is a big believer in e-commerce, and its overseas sales would certainly be done purely online.

Here’s the full teaser image; notice the Hong Kong map in silhouette and the iconic flower:

Click to enlarge.

Foxconn’s (LSE:HHPD; HKEX:2038; TPE:2354) plan for building a massive manufacturing plant in Indonesia is being delayed for around three to six months according to Indonesia’s industry minister, M.S. Hidayat, cited by the Jakarta Post this week. There were two main reasons given by both the minister and a Foxconn spokesperson regarding this postponement: the ongoing discussion on tax regulations, and the task of finding suitable local partners.

Regarding the tax situation, WSJ reports that Foxconn demanded that the Indonesian government draft a regulation that would effectively block super-cheap mobile phones from entering the country. The Indonesian minister mentioned that Foxconn also requested several tax incentives such as a special treatment for import tax.

Another reason for this delay is the challenge in finding suitable local partners to help with distribution and marketing. Foxconn’s possible local partners include the major manufacturer of consumer electronic goods, Hartono Istana Teknologi; state-owned cellular network firm, Industri Telekomunikasi Indonesia; or Indonesia’s largest telecommunication provider, Telekomunikasi Indonesia. But the government minister said on Monday that they might look for new candidates for Foxconn’s local partners to help solve the issue.

There was also a third reason stated by the ministry, which is the issue of the land for the factory. But so far no further details are available about that. A report from the Taiwan News Agency, (cited by the AFP), said that Foxconn also has concerns regarding insufficient measures against counterfeit gadgets in the country.

The Foxconn spokesperson reassured the public that they are committed to building a plant in Indonesia, and that this is just a postponement. The Foxconn representative added that there is no time-frame or spending target set for the project just yet. The Indonesian ministry stated that the initial investment made for this project may be as high as US$3 billion.

[Sources: Jakarta Post, WSJ, Republika, AFP, and Reuters, via e27]

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

Tiny Macau is Big on Facebook

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

Japan <3 Twitter

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

Who Loves Weibo?

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

Social Savants

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

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

Authorities at Taiwan’s stock exchange confirmed to Sina Tech that they were indeed investigating the unusual jump in price. But while the jump could indicate foul play and the timing is certainly suspicious, the Taiwan Stock Exchange’s senior executive VP told the Wall Street Journal that there are automated systems in place that trigger an investigation into any spike like HTC’s, and the stock exchange does not appear to have obtained any evidence of criminal behavior yet.

If no wrongdoing is found, the price jump would be HTC’s biggest gain in stock price so far this year. 7 percent is the maximum daily price growth allowed in the Taiwan Stock Market, but over the week as a whole, HTC’s stock jumped 15 percent in its best performance so far this year. Of course, any criminal wrongdoing that is uncovered could send shares tanking, so a lot of HTC investors are probably a bit on edge right now. But whether HTC’s celebrations of the end of its patent war with Apple will truly be tempered by a criminal case remains to be seen.

[via Sina Tech and NASDAQ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

LifeCrumbs

The Taipei-based startup was the winning idea in an internal rocket pitch within the team back in May. It first came about when they were tired of filtering through content spread across different social networks, and envisioned a platform that allows friends to have a more intimate sharing experience.

The idea of having a more personal social network reminds me a little of the Path app, which restricts users to only 150 connections. However, Maggie Cheung, co-founder of LifeCrumbs, tells us that her app stresses thoughtful content sharing above all else:

[...] Path encourages users to share every moment, such as music they are listening to, or when they wake up and go to sleep. We encourage our users to share only the memorable moments that truly define their day. These are the moments that they value and want to remember about their day. This the quality content that is really worth sharing.

In my opinion, the app looks pretty. It does take a bit of getting used to, because unlike most apps which have the features laid across at the bottom of the app, LifeCrumbs has them hidden. It appears only when you tap on the arrow at the bottom of the screen.

Maggie also says that the startup will be releasing a Chinese version in mid November, and the startup has an Android version in the works too. It also plans to take advantage of the calendar feature and introduce a new “planning” function, letting users easily plan events with their friends.

If you’d like to give the app a try, you can download it for iOS here.

The “Human Flesh Search Engine” is a concept that originated in mainland China, but according to the People’s Daily, Taiwan has just made it officially legal in cases of public interest. But before you start stalking up a storm, be warned: in cases that are found to exceed what is in the public interest, you will be vulnerable to lawsuits.

“Human Flesh Search Engine,” for those who aren’t aware, is the term Chinese internet users have applied to the way that net users band together to track down people’s true identities. This is often used to expose corrupt officials or other people whose behavior offends the internet-using public but whose identities aren’t immediately clear. For example, in the recent “Watch Brother” case, net users uncovered the name and background of a government official after a photo of him wearing an expensive watch and smirking at the scene of a bloody highway accident spread over Chinese message boards and weibo.

In the Chinese media, there has been much discussion over whether this is a violation of privacy or a danger to social stability, so it will be interesting to see if Taiwan’s approach paves the way for any official legislation about the human flesh search engine on the mainland. In a country where the freedom of the press is often severely curtailed, the human flesh search engine can serve an important social service, but of course, it can also turn into an online witch hunt.

I think Taiwan has taken a very reasonable approach here in allowing the practice in general while giving the courts the right to set things straight when the human flesh searching goes overboard and veers into the realm of stalking or libel. I wouldn’t expect China to propose similar legislation anytime soon, but with a new crop of leaders about to enter the picture, I suppose there’s really no way of knowing what could happen.

[Dongfang Morning via Sina Tech]

Haven’t heard enough of mobile messaging apps this week? The Next Web is reporting that Taiwan-based Cubie has just raised $1.1 million in series A seed funding from a group of investors, including B Dash Ventures, NTT Investment Partners, Gumi Ventures, and 500 Startups.

Speaking of 500 Startups, Cubie was also among one of the many new startups included in the latest batch for Silicon-Valley accelerator program. Over on the Cubie blog, the startup explains why joining the program is an important step in its growth into new markets:

500 Startups has, from its inception, shown kickass leadership from women and a focus on for-women services, strengths which we hope to take advantage of over the coming months. We want to learn how to better serve our users and reach out to new ones in North America and elsewhere. 500’s team of partners, mentors and coaches will, we think, be one of our best resources to achieve that.

As we’ve pointed out over the past week, there is a strong field of mobile messaging apps coming out of Asia. Line from Japan, KakaoTalk from Korea, and WeChat from China are the most notable players to date. DeNA recently launched it’s Comm chat app, and yesterday we told you about Balloon, who just raised funding from Nissay Capital.

But the folks at Cubie say that they “don’t believe messaging is a zero sum game” and that in this field with no established leader yet, there is still a lot of opportunity for everyone involved. Cubie has been pushing a strong focus on services for women, so it may be able to ride that differentiator to stand out from the rest.

An iCook.tw user’s recipes.

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures clearly likes the look of what Taiwanese startup Polydice is cooking up, and has today invested in its social site iCook.tw. As the name suggests, iCook is focused on recipes, and provides a Pinterest-esque platform for people to share their tastiest concoctions.

The funding amount hasn’t been revealed, but it’s significant as this is the first Taiwan move since the Cyberagent (TYO:4751) investment arm first set up offices in Taipei late last year. (There was also the backing for restaurant review site iPeen last Spring, before the local office opened). CyberAgent Ventures explains in today’s announcement that the “investment was made through the CA-JAIC China Internet Fund II, which is jointly managed by CyberAgent Ventures and Japan Asia Investment.”

The investment firm reckons that iCook.tw is the fastest-growing social recipes site in Taiwan. Catherine Chang from the CyberAgent Ventures Taipei office tells us that the startup “has been live for 11 months, and has 70,000 users and 10,000 recipes – all user generated.”

Catherine adds that, at the moment, iCook is monetizing via a mix of banner ads and promotional tie-ups with food companies – as seen with its brand-oriented recipe/cooking contents. But the startup is mainly focusing on building up its user-base – and Facebook fandom – for now, as well as its iOS app, which was “released last month and has reached 150,000 downloads.”

As for the appeal of this kind of niche social site, the announcement points out how it’s learning from the Japanese web scene:

As there is a void for this type of media in Taiwan, and successful business models have been executed off existing recipe-based SNS in Japan, CyberAgent Ventures believes that iCook.tw has strong potential to become the leading player in Taiwan and will take advantage of CyberAgent Inc’s wide network of resources to enhance the company’s growth and value.

Indeed, the startup team is particularly looking to Japan’s Cookpad, which brought in over $40 million in sales last year thanks to a mix of ads, brand promotions, and premium content.

Things aren’t looking good for Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC (TPE:2498). If you look at the chart from HTC’s Q3 results deck (see right), you can see how revenue and profit just kept sliding.

The forecast for 4Q12 is set at NT$60 billion ($2 billion), an expected 14 percent drop compared to this quarter. With the holiday season and crazy Chinese buying habits for 11/11, numbers should go up. But probably won’t be the case for HTC as it has predicted its own fate.

An IDC report released yesterday showed that HTC shipped about 7.3 million units in 3Q 2012, which represents four percent of the smartphone market share, a six percent drop compared to the same period in the previous year. Meanwhile just north of Taiwan, Korean giant Samsung has a whopping 31.3 percent market share for 3Q 2012, a 8.6 percent gain compared to 3Q 2011.

Is HTC screwed? Things certainly don’t look good. But there is a glimmer of hope for the company, at least, and it comes in the form of its slick new HTC J Butterfly. So far it’s only available in Japan (we had a look at it at a KDDI event recently), but leaked images suggest that it could be making its way to Verizon in the US market soon, where it would go head-to-head with Samsung’s flagship model, the Galaxy S3. [Via Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch]

[Download image version of chart]

What was initially a domestic hit has been pushed aggressively abroad, particularly around Asia. NHN Japan has worked with Thai food manufacturer CPF, Thai airways, and a partnership with carrier AIS [1]. The company also has a tie-in for the Samsung Galaxy Pocket handset that pre-loads their app. Check out the commercial for that below:

Meanwhile in Taiwan the company has a partnership with convenience store chain Family Mart as well as a partnership with VIBO Telecom, with whom it has a television commercial with its cute stickers front and center:

In Indonesia, Line has been working with carrier Telkomsel pushing its customized Telkomsel sticker pack in the country. And, as you might expect, there’s a Telkomsel commercial featuring Line as well.

Meanwhile, back in its home market of Japan the service has about 32.6 million users. As we noted earlier this month, it can now count the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office as one of its newest, as the PMO recently announced that it would use Line to communicate important messages to the public.

With more and more companies getting into chat applications (DeNA just launched its own chat application, Comm, two days ago), Line’s aggressive pursuit of users in markets around Asia will no doubt give it an edge.

China’s Tencent is pushing hard as well, with strong efforts in Indonesia in particular. But Line has expressed interest in expanding to China as well, which should make for a very interesting showdown indeed.

The deal will mean that Mobage mobile apps for iOS and Android will be made available via the games icon at the top of Yahoo Kimo’s mobile portal (see the games page, pictured below). The Mobage titles that are currently available in traditional Chinese include popular titles like Ninja Royale and Cygames Inc’s Rage of Bahamut.

Interestingly, Yahoo Hong Kong’s mobile site will also feature a mobile games option from which users can then arrive at this new Yahoo Kimo games section. So DeNA is actually reaching more than just Taiwan here. Yahoo Kimo’s managing director Frank Chen noted in the announcement:

With the combination of internationally popular games brought from DeNA and featured content compiled by Yahoo!Kimo editors, we’ll bring our users the best mobile social gaming experience.

As we have mentioned before, DeNA has been quite active in mainland China over the past year, with similar Mobage partnerships with companies like Renren, Kaixin001, and lots more besides.

Just two weeks ago, the wildly popular Rage of Bahamut was launched on Mobage China as well.

Drilling down to notable APAC markets to compare with last year’s rankings, we can see that Taiwan jumped from 25th to 16th, credited with big improvements by a number of criteria, including ‘protecting investors.’ Japan, on the other hand, was downgraded in many areas, including ‘starting a business.’

If you’d like to check out the entire report, head on over to DoingBusiness.org, or view the rankings page here if you’re in the mood to digest some numbers. If you’d like the tl;dr version, I’ve included their infographic below.

Photo: iTunes.Apple.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: Republika.co.id, Egamelanku]

Humans suck, with their continual, nagging demands for things like water, shelter, and wages. That’s why the Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn (LSE:HHPD; HKEX:2038; TPE:2354) has been aiming to replace some of its workers with one million robots by 2014. But that plan seems to be very seriously behind schedule, with a source telling a China Radio finance reporter that only five percent of the planned robot workforce of 300,000 for 2012 has even been built.

That amounts to just 15,000 robot manufacturing units being ready for action by the end of this year, casting serious doubt on the ability of Foxconn – which does final assembly for the likes of Apple, Amazon, and HP – to hit its target of one million automatons being put into action by 2014.

Foxconn has said that robots will only replace a fraction of its huge human workforce, doing the most repetitive aspects of final assembly on things like iPads, iPhones, and Kindles. But there are cost factors involved too; as China’s cities get more expensive, basic wages in the manufacturing sector are rising in line with the nation’s minimum wage levels, which look set to hit 1,700 RMB ($268) per month in southern China’s Guangdong province in 2013. That’s close to double the rate a couple of years back.

As we noted in January of this year, some robots have been put to work at Foxconn plants in mainland China, but it’s not clear how large a number that represents.

Foxconn gets a great deal of scrutiny owing to its partnership with Apple – some would say to the detriment of media coverage of working conditions at other manufacturers in China.

[Source: China Radio - article in Chinese]

While traveling can be lots of fun, some aspects of it can be quite mundane. Buying guide books and looking up “popular restaurants” using Google – we all end up going to the same places. The rise of Airbnb is a clear sign that people are looking for more in their trips. And a startup from Japan plans to tackle this travel sharing market with a new product called Meetrip.

Meetrip is a smartphone app (pictured below) that connects local users (or guides) with travelers. After signing up using Facebook credentials, local guides can quickly and easily create their own tour plans. For example, a three-hour tour to explore an old town not known to tourists, or a long lunch hour to enjoy the best hot noodles in town. Travelers can find interesting tours and sign up for them. By communicating back and forth with the guide, together you can come up with a perfect tour just for you. The details of the tour including the price can be revised afterwards, leaving space for adjustments.

The idea of Meetrip came from co-founder Takashi Kiyama who is a frequent traveler. Of all the trips he has ever taken, he explains that the ones that he remembers the most are those where he met someone local and communicated with them. And that’s why Meetrip focuses on people rather than plans. The team founded the company in June 2011, and has been working on the product for four months. They released a prototype in Taipei, Taiwan, and conducted beta user interviews to enhance the user experience.

The motivation for locals to use Meetrip can be many things, including interacting with travelers from distant places, speaking/practicing foreign languages, or explaining a special place in your area to travelers. These are the initial reasons why locals begin using the app; but with time, Meetrip can become a significant source of income for them. For this reason, the team is focused on bringing their travel product to Asian countries first. Meetrip can be used in Tokyo and Taipei for now, but there are plans to expand to Seoul, Jakarta, and Bangkok within the next few months. The startup’s goal is to release Meetrip in more than 10 countries cities this year.

The company behind Meetrip is Duckdive. The other co-founder is Nobuhiro Ariyasu. As a university student, he founded and sold his first company to Net Age Group. His second startup was a C2C market place named Cyta.jp. The CTO of Duckdive is Shinya Kasatani, who while working as CTO for another company released a very popular iPhone app called Pocket Guitar. The paid app has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. They are all graduates of Keio university.

Alibaba-owned Taobao.com, China’s largest C2C online marketplace, began expanding to Hong Kong and Taiwan early this year, Tech in Asia learned in a press meeting with Hong Kong and Taiwan media on Monday. It has been hush-hush as the overseas teams in Taiwan and Hong Kong have been laying the foundations over the past months, which include logistics, payment, and customer service.

While the preparation work is still ongoing, Taobao Hong Kong and Taiwan have racked up impressive early numbers. According to Daphne Lee, director of overseas business, Taobao has attracted 1.2 million registered users in Hong Kong and 0.5 million users in Taiwan so far.

To make sense of Taobao Hong Kong’s figure, 1.2 million is about a quarter of Hong Kong’s internet users, which I think is quite impressive. Taiwan requires more work as users face logistic problems because delivering goods from China to Taiwan isn’t as simple. Plus, Taiwanese users still have doubts about whether the goods will actually arrive.

Many people also still have the impression that Alipay can only accept payment from local China banks, which of course would limit Taobao’s overseas business opportunities. But it was just earlier this year that Alipay also enabled Mastercard and VISA, which is a big boost for international users.

Taobao’s move to Hong Kong and Taiwan is pretty straightforward. Besides the close geographic proximity, the populations of Hong Kong and Taiwan are also largely made up of ethnic Chinese, which lowers the communication barrier.

Taobao’s expansion has also brought about some positive changes for merchants as well. Daphne said that CatWorld, a Taiwan-based merchant, had only a moderate income when it was on Yahoo Kimo online auction. But the numbers shot up after it joined Taobao, generating over 6 million RMB (about $1 million) in monthly sales.

Honestly speaking, the combined population of about 28 million in Hong Kong and Taiwan is just slightly above Beijing’s population. It’s a small figure. And I’m certainly not saying that the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets aren’t important — they are, because I believe the regions have bigger-than-average spenders when compared to the mainland. The move to Taiwan and Hong Kong also gives the Taobao team a taste of overseas expansion, and I’m pretty sure they won’t just stop at Greater China. Daphne revealed that Singapore and Malaysia are seeing quite a bit of interest in Taobao, too. I would even say that Taobao in English isn’t too far away.

But it won’t come until Greater China is conquered, and knowing how brilliant Jack Ma is, I would bet on the Alibaba Group winning in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The stats come from looking at the excellent startup database, 17startup.com. It now lists 5,182 startup companies in the country. So where was the growth? Guangdong province, nestled next to Hong Kong down in southern China, saw 1 percent growth in the number of startups based there. But the shift away from Beijing seems to have been spread across the whole country, with the provinces of Fujian, Hubei, and Hunan now emerging as areas with more entrepreneurial drive than ever before. The 93 listed startups in Fujian, on the southeast coast, is a sign of healthy growth:

Of course, the startups are best judged by quality, not numbers in a certain area, so we’ll have to wait and see if Fujian or some other inland areas can prove to be innovative and/or profitable on the web.

In the past couple of years, Sichuan province (still in fifth place) has gone from being renowned for its food to being known, in tech circles, for an impressive array of startups. That’s the kind of diversification backed up by quality that China’s poorer provinces need to show. To celebrate this shift away from the capital, this week I’ll be looking at a few startups from Fujian and some other inland provinces. Stay tuned!

[UPDATED: Swapped out a tastier - and more colourful - pie]

The company’s first venture abroad was back in 2008, back when e-commerce was a fledgling industry and the company’s reputation was only really well established at home in Japan. It was then that Rakuten looked to Taiwan to expand its B2B2C business, joining forces with retailer President Group – the operator of Starbucks, 7–11, and others in Taiwan – to establish a joint venture (51 percent Rakuten’s capital, 49 percent PG). Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan was launched in May of that year, with the company hoping its success in Japan would translate well to the Taiwanese market.

So how did that game plan work out? Initially, it didn’t go so well says Rakuten Taiwan’s CEO Yuichi Ejiri. The company struggled with all kinds of problems out of the gate, including brand recognition:

Rakuten Taiwan CEO Yuichi Ejiri

At that time 14 Japanese people came to Taiwan and just tried to copy everything from Japan. As you can imagine, it didn’t work and we changed a lot of things. For example the website design. Rakuten’s webpage now has changed; at that time they preferred more text not graphics or banners.

But in Taiwan they preferred more fashionable banner designs. At that time we did copy the Japanese simple, text-focused pages and the reception from the market was terrible. Many people said it looked like an old-age portal site. So we started changing piece by piece, now our page design is totally different than the Japan page.

Ejiri notes that even though Rakuten had changed its online public face, the basic logic that made the company successful at home still remained – the company’s expertise in improving things like conversion and click-through rates, this was still key to building its business in Taiwan in the early days.

In addition to wooing Taiwanese consumers, Rakuten also had the difficult task of acquiring new merchants to sell on its platform. In Japan the company was already established as an internet giant, and it didn’t have to work so hard to bring merchants on board and could do most of it online. But in Taiwan Rakuten was still a new brand, and so the company required more offline activities in order to acquire merchants, such as send forms or explanations, make calls from sales staff, or visit them in person.

Even today, years after Rakuten first arrived in Taiwan, the company still uses such methods, noting that Taiwanese merchants are more demanding. The result is a local management process very different from Japan. The brand is better recognized now however, and as Rakuten’s online application interface improves it hopes to gradually make merchant acquisition easier.

The company’s efforts with certain types of merchants have indeed paid dividends, particularly gourmet/food merchants. Ejiri tells us that Rakuten paid special attention to these merchants:

Most other platforms don’t want to take these merchants in, because it takes time to implement such internet shop operations. But we thought it was a big opportunity, because there are so many types of local food. So we intentionally tried to focus on these gourmet shops and sent a lot of sales people to go to the islands and the countryside to recruit all those unique food shops. It took a long time to teach them and also we did many tie-ups with gourmet websites and TV programs. But finally we are the largest gourmet e-commerce site in Taiwan.

The other big category for Rakuten Taiwan is women’s fashion. The Taiwanese e-commerce space began with online auctions and low-cost clothes of relatively high quality imported from China. Rakuten has catered to this market segment well, and currently nearly 80 percent of its users are female. The company has also begun heavily promoting men’s fashion and note that this sector is growing quite fast now as well.

Considering that Rakuten just recently launched its Kobo e-reader in Japan (though not without some difficulties), what about the prospect for e-books and other digital content in Taiwan? Rakuten Taiwan already has a headstart in a sense since its mother company, 7-Eleven, has the largest online bookstore (books.com.tw) with somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the market. There’s a corresponding shop on Rakuten Taiwan with the name Rakuten Books. So it appears there’s a ready-made space for Kobo to fit in there.

Looking at the big picture, Ejiri points out that business for Rakuten Taiwan is growing 50 percent year on year. It currently has around 2000 merchants, over 1.8 million items, and 1.5 million users in total. But perhaps most importantly, I’m told that Rakuten Taiwan started being profitable as of a couple of months ago.

The next step I think is to create a kind of Rakuten ecosystem, like we have created in Japan. I think we can do the same in Taiwan, and that would be a great differentiator for us, and it should be a very different business model never seen in Taiwan.

While we don’t have any revenue figures for Rakuten’s Taiwan subsidiary, it looks like the group is making good progress since its initial entry into the market in 2008. One of the things that I like about Rakuten’s ‘Englishnization’ program (though I’m not a fan of that name) is that it facilitates good cooperation and communication between the company and its subsidiaries. So lessons learned in markets at home and abroad can have a greater impact. Indeed the company’s expansion plans have not been without the occasional speedbump, such as its Lekutian joint venture in China with Baidu which recently closed.

But like other Japanese internet companies expanding abroad, it is encouraging to see organizations like Rakuten actively looking to markets abroad rather than focusing on business at home and treating foreign markets as a bonus.

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) will travel to 10 cities all around the world for its World Hack competition starting from August 23 to October 1. The ten cities on tour are Austin, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Berlin, Taipei, Jakarta, Bangalore, Barcelona, Vancouver, Warsaw, and Moscow. The World Hack days in Taipei, Jakarta, and Bangalore will start on September 11th, 13th, and 17th respectively.

According to the World Hack website (spotted by The Next Web), each city-stop is a day-long coding event where developers are given time to work on new social apps – solo or in groups – with Facebook engineers on hand to support and answer questions. The topics that will be covered at the event include Facebook APIs, mobile SDKs, and Open Graph.

Facebook didn’t mention what the prizes are, but it is the biggest social networking website in the world, so developers needn’t worry about a lack of goodies. You can learn about the previous Facebook hack event here.

The competition is also a great opportunity for developers to meet up and connect with more like-minded people. Should you pass the registration process, the price for each ticket is around $25 for each city event. Facebook will be filtering the participants, so no-one is guaranteed access [1].

Of course, if you’re interested in hackathons, we have our own coming up in October in Bandung, Indonesia. We hope to see you there!

Head to the official World Hack homepage to register or learn more.

[Via: The Next Web]

Japanese online service provider Excite recently launched its advertising-based points program called Excite Points, claiming to be the first of its kind user reward system in Indonesia. We talked to Nobu Kiyohara, the manager of Excite business development group [1], about the company’s expansion plans in the country.

We understand that in the last year, Excite Japan has started to look to expansion into other Asian countries, notably Taiwan and Indonesia, with the Philippines next in sight. In Taiwan, Excite has invested in two companies: e-commerce platform PCHome, and women-oriented review site Fashion Guide. Nobu added that they also tried to expand to China, but it was hard for them to identify the right market there. Should its points system prove successful in Indonesia, Excite plans to bring it to the Philippines next.

So how do Excite Points work? As shown in the above graphic, users login to the website and earn points through online activities, such as clicking a banner, subscribing to Groupon, getting a quote from an insurance company, or making purchases. Basically, it’s gamification. The points can then be redeemed for prizes at the Excite Points website.

At the moment, the program is still in the testing phase, and so the redemption options are only in the form of SmartFren phone credit top-ups. To provide more redemption options, Excite is looking to partner with Indonesian telcos Telkomsel and Indosat in the next couple of months. Excite also plans to add other products such as gadgets and more merchant’s products in the future.

The points are funded by the advertisers, or whoever sets the online activity. The company will pay Excite based on CPA (Click per Acquisition) according to what the advertisers want, like sending a quote on new auto insurance, for example. Excite explains that the CPA method offered by the program makes more sense than the usual CPC (Cost per Click). This is because the latter doesn’t guarantee that users complete the advertiser’s target activity even when they have seen and clicked on the ads, as explained on the following slide:

Nobu claims that Excite Points advertisements are better than Google Adsense and Adwords in acquiring potential customers. Google can help you acquire customers, he says, who are already interested in the product, according to user search keywords and content. While Excite Points can help acquire potential customers who might not even know about the product. The points program can introduce products to new customers who are actively seeking to earn points on the website. Of course, I’d personally say that each method has its own strengths and weaknesses.

On the Indonesian Market and Foreseeable Problems

Right now, Excite is looking to expand aggressively into the Indonesian market with its points system in terms of users, but especially advertisers. Nobu added:

Honestly speaking, the advertisement market is still small in Indonesia. I believe it’s 6 billion ad dollars including TV, traditional media, and online media. Online media consists of about only one to two percent of the whole market, but it’s growing. We are anxious to go into this market and become a game changer.

Nobu revealed that in Japan the 15-year-old points-based business system has encountered problems with “point hunters.” These are certain users who only look to get points without giving any real tangible benefits to the advertisers. A lot of point hunters even go to the extent of making multiple accounts to get the points. Should that happen, Excite already has the technology to maximize the system’s effectiveness. One such example is that Excite can submit a weekly report regarding user CPA, and then the advertisers can approve or disapprove the users regarding the point rewards. This is already implemented right now.

Whereas many other Japanese companies tend to go by themselves into new markets, Excite sees partnerships with the local major conglomerate Sinar Mas Group as its strength and differentiator here in the country. Nobu believes that together with the partner’s local knowledge and Excite know-how, they can execute and deliver the products well.

Excite doesn’t have an entity yet in Indonesia, and the team consists of four to five people located in SmartFren’s office at the moment. Nobu explained that one of the reasons why Excite chose to partner up with the carrier is because the company has data and access on active PC internet users in the country. Excite has also partnered up with mobile CPA network giant Adways Indonesia, and that should help them in the market as well.

Xiaomi execs including Lei Jun with folks from Inventec in Taiwan

According to a Techweb report quoting “Taiwanese media,” Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has announced that a Xiaomi phone will launch in Taiwan late this year. When contacted, Xiaomi PR representatives confirmed that Lei Jun was in Taiwan and that he was researching overseas markets, but didn’t confirm or deny that Xiaomi has plans to launch a phone in Taiwan later this year.

Still, there’s little reason to doubt the news, as Lei Jun has previously mentioned in public his plans to bring the phone to Taiwan sometime in 2012. What’s not immediately clear is whether the phone Taiwan gets will be the M1, which has been available in China for nearly a year already, or whether what goes on sale there will be a newer model.

In addition to apparently making plans for a Taiwan launch, Lei Jun and his team are visiting suppliers and partners based in the area, including Hon Hai (the owners of key Xiaomi supplier Foxconn).

In browsing Xiaomi exec Lin Bin’s weibo account for this story, I also came across an interesting tidbit and a useful reminder for startups: successful startups don’t waste money. Accordingly, Mr. Lin apparently flew to Taiwan in an economy class seat. I feel certain that if he had wanted to, the company could afford to pay for business class accommodation. But why waste the money? Our hats are off to Mr. Lin here, and we hope other successful startups will take this display of frugality and modesty to heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese casual gaming fans will soon be able to put down their smartphones and instead pick up their remote controls. That’s because Ubitus has just announced that its GameCloud platform will launch in the country in partnership with China Telecom on October 1st, 2012. It’ll bring “cloud gaming” to owners of web-enabled Smart TVs or set-top boxes, allowing them to play console-style high-definition games without the need to actually have a games console. The Ubitus library of licensed titles will bring games covering motor racing, sports, RPGs, virtual fighters, puzzlers, and more, all into the living room on the big-screen.

Games consoles like the Xbox are technically illegal in China, and are only available via the grey-import market. The only real – well, legal – challenger to this new Ubitus and China Telecom tie-up would be the newly-launched, home-grown CT510 ‘eedoo motion’ device.

Chinese brand Skyworth already has plenty of 'smart TV' models.

It gives Taiwan-based Ubitus the first commercial cloud gaming platform that’s running in China. No pricing details have yet been revealed, and this will likely be limited to China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) home broadband subscribers who actually have a fast enough connection speed (after factoring in China Telecom losing more than half of your promised speed somewhere in the tubes) to handle this new wave of cloud gaming.

The deal also saw three major makers of HD smart TVs – China’s Skyworth and Konka, and South Korea’s LG (066570:KS) – brought in to demo the new platform at China Telecom’s own 2012 Tianyi (E-surfing) 3G Handset Fair which took place this weekend in Guangzhou, and where the announcement (pictured top) took place. It’s not clear if they’ll also be demoing the cloud gaming system in-store in the run-up to its October launch.

Just last week we looked at new stats which showed that 30 percent of new, web-enabled smart TVs were being sold in China, making the market second only in terms of enthusiastic adoption to Japan.

Credit: NYT

I stumbled upon this fascinating article by The New York Times reporting on 7-Eleven’s explosive growth in Jakarta, Indonesia. 7-Eleven has a total of 69 stores in Indonesia so far. And while I haven’t seen too many 7-Eleven outlets myself here, the article does give a lot of kudos to the quickest growing convenience store in town. I do see more of the Indomaret and Alfamart chains however, both of which are local competitors to 7-Eleven.

7-Eleven has everything the young Indonesian population wants: free-to-use internet, cheap food, and 24-hour non-stop operation which allows youngsters to hang out late. Some stores even have local live bands playing at night, making it more hip and connected with the younger generation. Henri Honoris, the president director of Modern Putra, 7-Eleven’s Indonesian franchisee, remarked in the article that his chain of convenience stores has given Indonesians “an alternative — A warung with better quality.” Warung means small traditional stores in Bahasa Indonesia.

Some readers might recall my article about Taiwan’s 7-Eleven where the convenience stores have become one of the more popular spots for making payments for any online purchases. For a better idea of how that works, I encourage you to check out that post.

As much as I’m fascinated by how e-payment, or rather, COD works in Taiwan, it made me wonder if a similar COD system could work in Indonesia. Perhaps it could. Reading this article by NYT does give me some hope. Indonesia’s chain of 7-Eleven stores could repeat such a ‘Taiwan-style’ payment system, one that allows customers to collect and pay for things they buy online through a nearby convenience store.

That would help e-commerce players a fair bit in Indonesia, taking over the logistic and payment role within the tiresome e-commerce chain. While bringing more foot traffic to 7-Eleven would help boost sales too. I’m also not ruling out the possibility for Indomaret or Alfamart to pull off this concept too (I wonder do they read our blog?) as they are currently the national leaders in the convenience store race.

Foxconn, the world’s biggest OEM manufacturer of gadgets, will break ground tomorrow on a new China HQ and research center in Shanghai. Scheduled to be completed in early 2015, it’ll be located in the city’s Pudong district, near to other hi-tech facilities as well as Shanghai’s larger airport.

Taiwan-based Foxconn (LSE:HHPD; HKEX:2038; TPE:2354) has sent out invitations for the ground-breaking ceremony in readiness for tomorrow. The facility will house, according to PC World, research and development labs as well as a sales centre for its struggling e-commerce venture in China.

The new Foxconn HQ will not play host to a factory, of course. The Taiwanese OEM already employs about 1.2 million workers in mainland China across its huge plants in Shenzhen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Shandong province, Henan province, and other areas. The gadget manufacturer – assembling items for the likes of Apple, HP, Microsoft, and numerous other tech and retail brands – has been mired in controversy for many years in the country, with tragic suicides, factory-floor explosions, and worker violence often making international news.

In other Foxconn-related events today, we glimpsed some screenshots of a mooted Foxconn-made Baidu budget smartphone.

[Source: PC World]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

According to InMobi, the average mobile web user in Taiwan consumes six hours of media per day, and mobile accounts for 98 minutes (27 percent) of that total. This is just behind PCs (122 minutes), but ahead of television (88 minutes). Most of this media consumption comes during times when they are commuting or while lying in bed.

InMobi’s regional director and general manager for southeast Asia explained:

We see continued growth in mobile usage in Taiwan in the coming year, largely driven by social media and entertainment. Our research also shows that 79 percent of mobile web users plan to conduct mobile commerce over the next 12 months, a 31 percent increase from where we are today. With its proven influence on the consumer purchase cycle, mobile is now a vital part of marketing strategies for leading brands in the country.

You can check out InMobi’s informative graphic below, which illustrates most of their key findings for the mobile market in Taiwan.

A Taiwanese-made messaging app looks set to cash in on the craze for doodling that was stirred up by the OMGpop/Zynga game Draw Something. The app, LiiHo Handwriting Messenger, is free and out now for iPad, and has an English and Chinese interface. But anyone in the world can use it in any language since it’s all about chatting with your friends using handwriting, drawing, and even scribbling on photos.

Actually, the LiiHo app predates Draw Something by a whole six months, having launched back in August of last year.

Despite being way ahead of the zeitgeist in doodling apps, LiiHo doesn’t seem to have quite taken off yet – with only 27 ‘likes’ on Facebook. But this week it’s finally getting some coverage in local media in Taiwan. To find out more, we talked to David Lai, the marketing manager at LinkTel, the startup behind the app. He explains how they came up with the idea:

We simply want iPad users to skip the inconvenience of typing and switching keyboards for different languages, and regain the fun of conversation by handwriting and drawing.

It’s a nice example of the very bilingual tendencies of Taiwanese youngsters – using a mix of Chinese and English – bringing about a new twist in the familiar instant-messaging (IM) genre. It’s also a challenger to group messaging apps like WhatsApp or Line, even though it doesn’t require being tied to a phone number and there isn’t yet a version for iPhone. LiiHo users can add friends and chat with them either via their iOS Contacts app, username, or by logging-in with Facebook.

Once you’ve got some IM buddies on board, you can have fun doing three main things:

• Make handwritten message using your fingertip in the large white box (which shows as a preview on the yellow Post-It note area).
• Graffiti and scribble all over photos.
• Create full-size doodles using four size and colours of digital markers.

As for LinkTel as a startup, David says that it currently has capital of NT$125 million ($4.24 million), although it’s not divulged if that involves some seed funding. For now, he adds, they are “focusing on how to expend the user base, monetization is not a high priority.”

See more screenshots on the LiiHo homepage, or go straight to iTunes to download the LiiHo iPad app.

On a semi-related note: For a more business-minded approach to handwriting apps, check out the video demo of the Japanese-made 7notes app that we filmed last year.

Photo: ithome.com.tw

Internet search giant Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) today announced that it has started building a new data center in Changhua County in Taiwan, and has plans for limited testing and bringing it online in the second half of 2013.

This will be the third data center for Google in Asia, as it’s also working on two others which have yet to be completed. Those two centers in Singapore and Hong Kong are both scheduled to be completed in early 2013. But according to Google, the Taiwan data center will “be the first in [its] fleet to save energy through a nighttime cooling and thermal energy storage system.”

Google will also be hiring locally, and has a few positions listed on its website relating to the new data center.

The investment in this Taiwan facility is more than $300 million, part of more than $700 million that the company is spending in the region. It’s all part of Google’s efforts to ensure that users in the region can access its services quickly and reliably.

Of course, the majority of Asia’s internet users are from China — specifically 50.5 percent of them according to the most recent figures from Internet World Stats. Google is still operating in China, but navigates difficult waters with its Chinese search service now redirecting to its Hong Kong search.

[Data in map from Internet World Stats, as of December 2011]

We wrote about Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC (TPE:2498) and its new One Series a couple of weeks back during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And today in Singapore, the HTC One X (the flagship Android model) and V were both unveiled in at a media launch.

The One Series is said to rival traditional digital cameras with improvements to every part of the camera, including the lens, sensor, software, and even integrating a new custom HTC ImageChip. You can activate the camera almost instantaneously in 0.7 seconds and auto-focus in 0.2 seconds.

The One X has an 8.0 megapixel rear-facing camera, a 1.3 megapixel front camera, and can do 1080p HD video recording. The One V has 5.0 megapixel camera and does 720p HD video recording, but does not have a front-facing camera.

HTC shows off the camera. Click to enlarge.

With HTC Smart Flash in place, it claims to take better photos than Apple’s iPhone 4S in low light environments. You can also hold onto the shutter button and take up to 99 continuous shots at 4 frames per second. Personally, I really love the ability to record HD video and snap photos at the same time, just by hitting the shutter button.

The One Series also features Dropbox space for two years, which is more than enough space for 10,000 high-quality photos. I didn’t think this was particularly groundbreaking as compared to the other functions they introduced though.

For a richer and more authentic sound experience, they have also integrated Beats by Dr. Dre Audio into the HTC One Series. It is easy to access and listen to your playlists with the built-in HTC Sync Manager software, which automatically installs to your computer when connected. You can also customize the new Music Hub with your favorite music applications, such as Doubletwist, Zimly, and Soundhound.

Also, with its HTC Car Stereo Clip, you can bring your mobile music to your car’s sound system and connect to more than 50,000 online radio stations worldwide or play music from any service or app through your car speakers.

HTC has also made it easy to transfer what is playing on your phone to the TV screen wirelessly. All you need to do is to plug in the HTC Media Link HD accessory into the HDMI port of any HDTV, and then HTC One smartphones automatically senses the Media Link HD, configures, and using three fingers to swipe, you can share what is on your phone with your family. Even when you’re sharing on the TV screen, you can still continue to surf the internet or even check your emails on the phone.

I personally prefer the 4.7-inch display HTC One X in Polar White, it looks and feels absolutely stunning. One X has the new NVIDIA Tegra 3 Mobile Processor for clear graphics, faster applications, and longer battery life. It’s powered by a 1.5GHz Super 4-PLUS-1 quad-core processor and a high-performance 12-Core NVIDIA GPU. It will be available in select 4G LTE markets with the LTE-enabled Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor.

The HTC One X handset will be available in Polar White and Glamour Grey at S$898 (US$715). As for the HTC One V, it will be available in a color called ‘Jupiter Rock’ at S$398 (US$317). They will be available at all Singapore mobile operators and authorized retailers starting next Monday.

A big thanks to the representative who gave me a hands-on demo of the camera, which I put into the video below (apologies for the poor resolution):

I travel to Taiwan very often. It’s a nice place. And it is filled with 7-Elevens. You can find one of the franchises’ convenience stores on pretty much at every corner in Taiwan. You can buy and do almost everything there: you can photocopy, use a courier service, book taxis, purchase train tickets, and make payments. You can even buy bento, hot dogs, and guan dong zhu, at any time of day.

In Taiwan it’s a mega hit franchise owned by “Tong Yi” in which aptly means “dominate” or “rule all” in Chinese. What impresses me most is that the 7-Eleven stores there are able to collect all sorts of payments. For example, if you buy an item through Yahoo Kimo Auction, there’s an option for folks to pay cash-on-delivery (COD) through 7-Eleven. The seller will ship the product to the 7-Eleven store nearest to consumer’s location. The customer will pay in cash upon collecting the goods.

Alternatively, the seller can pass the customer a unique code, say abc123, which the customer will then key into an ibon machine to generate a receipt. The 7-Eleven counter will then charge the customer based on the receipt and then transfer the payment to the seller. Once the seller receives the money, he/she will ship the product directly to the customer.

Of course, consumers can also opt to pay through rival Family Mart, another smaller chain of convenience stores. Somehow these stores have become a logistics and payment partner for e-commerce stores in Taiwan. We saw this yesterday with the events and ticketing startup Accupass.

Taiwan’s 7-Eleven ibon machine also allows customers to buy train tickets, concert tickets, pay telephone bills, top up phone and gaming credits through the machine and pay cash directly at the 7-Eleven counter after making purchase. Going through a physical third-party player makes the customers a little more confident that the deal is trustworthy, and it provides a cozier environment for e-commerce in Taiwan to flourish. Plus there’s an ATM at every store which makes cash withdrawal and payment very convenient.

It is important to note that credit card payment is pretty common in Taiwan too. But that only caters to the middle classes who have access to credit cards. For folks who don’t have them, it is common to pay via convenience stores like 7-Eleven. Paypal is allowed in Taiwan, but unfortunately it isn’t popular.

I’m fascinated by how e-payment, or rather, COD works in Taiwan. It made me wonder if a similar COD system could work in Indonesia. I’ve heard of similar solutions in Indonesia already. But they aren’t widespread or seamless.

Folks who are new to the e-payment problem in Indonesia might assume that providing a Paypal-like solution would be sufficient. It’s more than that. The problem drills down fundamentally to human behavior: Indonesians are more comfortable paying via COD or bank transfer. Credit card payment is unfortunately not that common. In fact, we actually learned and localized too to adapt to Indonesia for our next Startup Asia conference.

Ultimately, it is the confidence level and habits which explain why people prefer to pay cash or do a bank transfer upon receiving their goods. It’s a decent solution but not ideal for e-commerce businesses. China’s e-commerce market has grown a lot faster in part thanks to the prevalence of mature online payment systems such as Alipay, UnionPay, and Tenpay.

Delivering goods to homes is expensive and having to counter-check if payment has been transferred by the right person (and in the right amount) means resources are wasted. It would be perfect if convenience stores in Indonesia could shoulder the logistics of e-payment to foster e-commerce. Anyway, driving more people to the convenience stores would also encourage more purchases. This way, the e-commerce sites can focus on what they do best, which is to sell more items online. But it wouldn’t be easy. Tong Yi took about seven years to make 7-Eleven the “de facto convenience store” in Taiwan. So if this ever happens in Indonesia it would be boom time for e-commerce in the country.

Image Credit: Isabel Lee and Ohmyasian

Two VC firms have made their first foray into Taiwan today, with DCM and Qualcomm Ventures leading a major funding round for Accuvally, the startup behind the Taiwanese events and ticketing site Accupass.com.

The precise details of the financing have not been revealed yet, but TechOrange reports that CEO Ben Lo is saying that it’s in the low millions of (US) dollars. But that’s still some big backing for Accupass, which has not yet been online a whole year. But it has already become the leading e-ticketing service in Taiwan.

As so often occurs in the region, there are some international sites in this market, but they’re not doing a very good and focused job – especially in terms of e-payment methods. Or language localization. Eventbrite is one example – it doesn’t even have a Chinese-language site. Accupass, in contrast, supports a wide array of online payment modes, from Paypal to bank transfers to nationwide convenience store payment systems.

Qualcomm Ventures is the VC arm of the American semiconductor and telecoms company Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM). Its more familiar with the mainland Chinese startup scene, where it has already backed Yongche and a few others. Apparently, Accuvally and its Accupass caught Qualcomm Ventures’ eyes at the DEMO China event last August.

Accupass, with help from that fresh injection of funds, will launch an English version of the site later this year and might also go more mainstream from its current geeky line-up of tech-related events.

[Source: TechOrange]

Contrasting screenshots of 360Buy's iPad listings yesterday and today.

Yesterday we first broke the story in English of how Amazon China had quit selling the iPad as part of the Apple vs Proview litigation over the iPad trademark. And now a much larger e-commerce store has also cleared its virtual shelves of iPads: 360buy, the second-largest such site in China. At this rate, Apple’s tablet will be facing a blanket e-commerce sales ban.

Luckily I grabbed a screenshot of 360Buy’s iPad listings yesterday, and so we can compare it with the scene today where every single iPad model has had the price removed and replaced with the notice “temporarily not reporting the price” (pictured above). Who knows how ‘temporary’ it’ll be. On the item page, the checkout button still works, but if you add any iPad model to your cart, it just vanishes when you try to checkout.

The nation’s most-used online B2C retailer, Alibaba’s Tmall, is still stocking and selling iPads.

But it’s not just 360Buy that has bowed to legal pressure to safeguard itself – Gome (HKG:00493), which is tiny in terms of internet retailing but huge on the High Street, has removed iPads from its e-commerce site though has not yet done so from its bricks-and-mortar stores.

Proview (HKG:0334) seems to have a very legitimate and strong – ie: a practical, not troll-ish – claim to using the iPad brand in China after Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) apparently failed to resolves its right to use it in the territory.

Proview is also a manufacturer in its own right – though not an OEM partner of Apple – making old-skool CRT and LCD monitors mostly for sale in developing markets. Judging by the pictures from Caixin (see below), its facilities in Shenzhen are somewhat shambolic. Proview was placed in the third-delisting stage in December 2011 and could be kicked out of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange if it doesn’t have its papers in order by this June. But that doesn’t affect its ongoing litigation with Apple.

In the final picture from Caixin, a worker sleeps in a messy corridor at Proview's factory in Shenzhen.

Two Chinese B2C e-commerce sites, Amazon China and Suning.com (SHE:002024), have removed the iPad from sale in an apparent move to avoid implication in the Apple versus Proview legal battle over the use of the iPad name in mainland China. Today, a search for ‘iPad’ or ‘iPad 2’ or any relevant permutation yields results only for accessories for (or rivals of) Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iconic tablet on both those sites (pictured above).

Just two days ago, an Apple reseller in a city in central China was raided by authorities and had 45 iPad 2 units seized as a part of the ongoing investigation into Proview’s (HKG:0334) claim.

The Chinese site QQ Tech has two screenshots of an iPad 2 listed on both Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) China and Suning, but with consumers unable to buy the item. Note that Amazon has removed the price and ‘buy’ button, while on Suning the checkout icon is greyed-out and the price was also missing:

Screenshots from QQ Tech News showing listings of an iPad 2 on both Amazon China and Suning, but with the checkout buttons disabled.

After a number of searches, we cannot find those same listings (and thereby truly verify the authenticity of the screenshots), and indeed cannot find any iPad models for sale on either of those two sites.

Suning and Amazon China are relatively minor players in the B2C e-commerce space in China. The market leaders, Alibaba’s Tmall.com, and 360buy, still have iPads for sale (see here and here), as does Dangdang (NYSE:DANG), one of China’s earliest consumer electronics online retailers.

Though the Apple-Proview litigation isn’t near a blanket ban on iPad sales in the country, it remains a possibility as that is one move that could be made by the federal Administration of Industry and Commerce (AIC). Proview – which is from Taiwan but has a mainland HQ in Shenzhen – might even make a filing to prevent iPads that are assembled in China from being exported. It’s now up to Apple to foresee what move Proview might make and get itself some time to respond from the AIC.

We’ll keep you updated if any further e-commerce sites also quit selling the iPad.

[Source: QQ Tech news - article in Chinese]

"My son's gonna love this when I get home... Er, I mean, I'm seizing this as part of our ongoing investigations!" (Image source: tech.ifeng.com)

Government officials in the city of Shijiazhuang raided an unnamed Apple reseller (not an official brand store) over the weekend, seizing 45 iPad 2 units as part of an investigation into Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) “iPad” trademark dispute in the country. This seems to be a one-off swoop (pictured right), and the iPad remains on sale in China as a whole, so there’s no need for iPad-toting CNN reporters to rip out their hair. But there is a chance – albeit slight – of this legal case turning even nastier.

We know that everyone who’s anyone is suing each other in the smartphone and tablet industry of late – but the tiny Proview (HKG:0334) maybe be more of a short-term risk to Apple than Motorola (NYSE:MMI) or HTC (TPE:2498). This Taiwanese manufacturer, whose mainland operations are based in Shenzhen, owns the record and trademark for the iPad name in China, and is demanding US$1.6 billion.

Chinese media say that some sellers in that afore-mentioned city have been spooked by the raid and are hiding their stock of iPads rather than risk having them seized by (not very trustworthy) local authorities. But it’s business as normal for all the official, unofficial, and grey-import iPad vendors across the country.

However, Beijing-based IP and IT lawyer Stan Abrams, who predicted the raid last week, points out that Proview’s case is strong, and different cities across the country might act separately:

Proview has apparently filed an enforcement application with the Beijing Administration of Industry and Commerce (AIC) [and has] a pending appeal to the High Court on a Shenzhen contract-based lawsuit that Proview won at the lower level, and a trademark infringement case that Proview filed in Shanghai.

Since Proview is the legal owner of the iPad trademark in China and, as far as we know, Apple has no good evidence that Proview filed the trademark in bad faith over a decade ago, it certainly looks good for Proview in both cases, particularly the one in Shanghai.

Local AICs [being federal agencies] have the authority to handle intellectual property infringement cases that involve trademark and unfair competition. In the case of the iPad dispute, we are dealing with trademark infringement.

What can the AIC do? It can raid premises, seize documents, equipment, products and counterfeit marks, and it can halt activity and lock down businesses. Once AIC makes a decision about infringement, it can order fines (these go to the government, not the trademark owner), revoke business licenses, and mandate a public apology.

This is a very high-profile and delicate case, so Chinese federal agencies might take a bit more care than normal not to blunder around, terrifying tech companies that employ millions of its citizens. But Apple’s team in China ought to be sweating, as China sure knows how to enforce IP when it’s convenient – ie: when a local company is on the losing end.

[News source: Phoenix Tech news - article in Chinese; via DigiCha]

The investment will be primarily used to expand the service to China and also to hire more talented engineers (click here if you’re interested to find out more). In fact, EZTABLE China has already started with ten local restaurants already on board. Founder Alex Chen shared with me more about this investment:

Rose Park Advisors will give us more insights on how to explore the potential market. Steven Ho is a serial entrepreneur who successfully founded his first startup uBid and sold it to eBay in 2001. He then founded Monday Shopping and sold it to Yahoo in 2008. His rich experience in entrepreneurship would make [our] team even stronger. appWorks’ ecosystem will continue to provide EZTABLE great support on every angle.

EZTABLE has grown quite a large margin since we last spoke with Alex. On average, the Taiwanese restaurant booking site has generated over 60,000 reservations each month and by the end of next month, it will hit the 1 million reservations milestone.

Alex told us that his lead investor, Rose Park Advisors, was searching for an O2O (Online 2 offline) business model startup in Pan Asia market for investment. After several research and interviews Rose Park Advisors thought EZTABLE is a good candidate. Alex elaborated:

We skyped twice and then I traveled to Singapore to meet Matt Christensen at Ritz Carlton Hotel. And then he decided to invest in us.

I met Steven [of NineYi Capital] through Jamie from appWorks. For the first few times we only discussed things about entrepreneurship and business model. Then Jamie brought me to a lunch with Steven when I started to do fund raising. During the lunch Steven noticed my “plan.” The next week he called me again and told me he would like to participate in the round. appWorks was in our seed round, and now participated again.

Whenever I meet entrepreneurs in Taiwan, they all sing the praises of EZTABLE. “But there’s still a long way to go,” as Alex told me over coffee when he last visited Singapore.

With an iPhone app and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, Justaple is a Taiwanese startup that aims to surpass the likes of Delicious, Instapaper, and Read It Later as a very connected, social bookmarking service.

Justaple's pitch here at Startup Arena 2012. Click to enlarge.

Justaple rips and saves your entire saved page – with the addition of videos in a future update – so that your collection will be totally searchable. It also means that broken links will not be an issue. The main differentiator is that your catalog of saved pages can be collected in unison with friends, and made either public or private.

Co-founder George Chiu (pictured right) just pointed out, giving his pitch here at our Startup Asia event, that it’ll soon allow users to actively discuss their saved items in the future, making it all into a sort of Oprah’s book club – except for webpages.

The Justaple iPhone app, a free download, allows offline reading as well as syncing of your saved stuff across mobile and desktop.

In the pitch, Justaple’s George looks to a coming implementation of ads based on keywords so that there’s a freemium option for casual users, as well as a pro version with a touted price of US$10 per month to unlock a lot more cloud storage space.

Take a look at the Justaple homepage and grab the app and browser extensions.

Dr. Pad is a Taiwan-based startup that aims to be “a painkiller for doctors’ headaches.” In essence, it is a mobile application designed to give doctors quick and easy access to medical data on the go. Co-founder Jacky Wang took to the stage this afternoon to explain exactly how that’s good for everyone.

She says that while many of us are living in the smartphone-friendly world of ubiquitous mobile internet, most doctors are tied to desktop PCs to access patient records and other data. This means that when they’re out and about in the hospital, they don’t have access to records, images, and data that might facilitate and streamline their treatment of patients.

Dr. Pad, then, is a multi-featured app that’s designed to give doctors with iPads access to all of that data while they’re on the go. The team behind it isn’t just techies and businesspeople either; the app has been developed in part by medical professionals, and further improved over the past year based on feedback from doctors in various hospitals who were able to use the app.

Because patient confidentiality is important, the app requires doctors to log in before displaying a dashboard that gives them a quick rundown of the current situation with all of their patients. From there, they can access all kinds of useful information from lab test results, medical images, and charts and graphs that show a patient’s progress over time according to variables the doctor chooses.

The team is based in Taiwan because the medical technology market is growing faster in Asia than anywhere else on earth. For the purposes of increasing scalability, the app employs a “freemium” model that allows hospitals to implement it quickly and cheaply. Dr. Pad will make its money later down the road with paid add-ons and other additional features, once they’ve built a significant enough userbase.

I’m no doctor, but it certainly looks like a pretty comprehensive service, and Jacky Wang told us that the company has gotten great feedback from the doctors it has talked to – 95 percent of doctors said they’d recommend the app to other doctors. Giving doctors better, quicker access to patient information seems like a pretty good thing, so as long as the data is accurate and secure, it’s easy to see why patients and doctors alike might get excited about Dr. Pad.

That said, the judges didn’t let these guys off the hook either. They answered some hard questions about where, exactly, their IP was in all of this, and how easy it is for hospitals to integrate the app with the hospitals’ existing systems.

Here’s a sentence we’ve never uttered before: Good news for Groupon in Asia! Yes, the American group-buying service Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) has extended its lead even further in the Taiwanese daily deals sector, and now commands over half of the market share on the island.

The last time we looked at the situation in Taiwan back in July 2011, we saw Groupon had 47.7 percent market share there as the entire group-buying industry grew by 8.3 percent. The very latest data, once again from Goodlife.tw, for December shows that the entire sector shrank by a minuscule 0.9 percent, and that Groupon Taiwan has grown in that time-span to now have an even firmer grasp – a full 52.37 percent in market share.

Gomaji and 17Life remain a consistent second and third place. The latter half of 2011 was good news not just for Groupon, but also for 17Life (gaining 5 percent), and for the mainland contenders Lashou, and Nuomi. That last one is partly owned by the Chinese social networking site Renren (NYSE:RENN). Meanwhile, both Gomaji and Yahoo’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) Taiwan deals portal remained stagnant. JiGoCity – which also operates in mainland China – is not shown in the graph but is another riser, ending the year in sixth place with a 4.1 percent share.

We’ve taken some of the raw data and made a chart to show how things have changed in Taiwan from July to December last year (click to enlarge):

Much of the top eight deals websites in Taiwan remain stable as the whole market shows less volatility than the ferocious scene in daily deals in mainland China.

Groupon entered Taiwan by acquiring the already successful local deals site Atlaspost exactly a year ago. At the time, Gomaji and 17Life were still its main competitors.

Meanwhile, the US site LivingSocial still hasn’t entered Taiwan, despite an aggressive push into Asia last summer. Perhaps it could jump-start its move into the stable Taiwanese group-buy market by buying up either Gomaji or 17Life.

[Source: Goodlife.tw - article in Chinese]

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is apparently keen to celebrate Chinese new year – more popularly known as Spring Festival here – with a “one-day Apple shopping event,” which we hope means ‘sale,’ on Friday, January 6th.

As spotted by the 9to5Mac crew, this is running in the Apple online stores in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. The Chinese online store (which is here), like all those others in the region, is running that promo artwork showing a dragon of colourful iPads with smart covers (pictured above). Yes, this coming lunar new year will be the year of the dragon. The Chinese store also features unique integration with both Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent’s (HKG:0700) Weibo so that people can spread the word of the upcoming event.

It’s also being dubbed “red Friday” by Apple, but there’s no mention of discounts or sales, or how much online shoppers could expect to save. If it’s anything like the American tradition of black Friday sales, then there could be some sweet deals which might well run out before the end of the day – so prepare yourself for some virtual elbowing and queue-jumping.

Japan, meanwhile, had its own special day on January 1st 2nd with the traditional ‘lucky bag’ system of buying a mysterious bagful of goodies for a set price – and Apple is one of the most popular bricks-and-mortar retailers on that day.

If you live in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, or the Philippines, check back into the Apple online store for your country on Friday.

[Source: 9to5Mac]