You probably have no idea how big the construction industry is, do you? Check it out. This year, it was a $7.2 trillion industry. By 2020, it will hit $12 trillion. It currently accounts for 13 percent of the global GDP and will hit 15 percent by 2020. That’s just behind China’s GDP and way above Japan’s GDP, according to numbers from last year). So, to say the least, it’s a huge market. That’s why Builk is one of the more promising startups coming out of Thailand. It’s hitting one of the biggest industries in the world.

I talked to Patai Padungtin, co-founder and “principal evangelist” of Builk, who gave me the lowdown on the startup.

Basically, Builk is a Software As A Service (SaaS) platform that allows construction companies to manage their construction projects. This includes tracking inventory, gathering construction information, and what Patai believes to be a social network for construction companies. Currently, over 2,000 companies are using the software, with the majority of them being Thai small-to-medium sized construction enterprises that Builk locked in via word of mouth. The company started in 2009, and released its first product in 2010.

How Builk makes money from freemium

Patai strongly believes in the freemium model, because according to him, the construction industry is old fashioned.

We come from the construction industry so we know how they work, and we also know intimately what the concerns are. And we know that if we didn’t offer our service free from the start, the companies wouldn’t try it. That’s why we also don’t offer a premium model.

This underlines how difficult an industry Builk is attempting to penetrate and how important it is for Patai to have a construction background. He’s got industry credibility from over 10 years of experience in construction. And the team’s also got the the experience, having built Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software since 2005.

Promising future

With that background, Patai knows that there are a few key ways get revenue, namely from advertisements, construction market research, and licensing. In the near future, Patai’s got some cool plans:

For our next product, Builk 3.0, is ready for international users to use Builk for their construction businesses. But we still focus on the Thailand and Indonesia markets. We are exploring an opportunity in Australia now. Next month our first iOS construction site collaboration app, called Builk SiteWalk, will be launched. and it will be free to disrupt the construction industry again.

By the end of this year, you can expect to see some really cool stuff coming from Builk, including more features and building on their current platform. It really pays to be deep in a vertical.

via Jo@net on Flickr

I spent a week in Bangkok, meeting with startups and industry professionals, and I’m fascinated. The nascent startup scene is evolving at a clip. It’s rising out of a newfound political stability (although that’s still a bit shaky) and a host of elements that have been waiting to shine. With startups like Ookbee getting recent funding and stars like Builk winning Echelon, Thai startups are accelerating like crazy. Just in the past year, Launchpad and Hubba co-working spaces opened up and all three of the biggest key telcos in Thailand, AIS, True, and DTAC have been investing money in incubating new startups (and yes, that’s particularly political, particularly unique). Not to mention, tech blogs like Thumbs Up and Blognone are ever so influential.

And with all of these developments all happening within a very short time frame, how could Thailand could accelerate to the point that it is today?

Well, let’s not get ahead ourselves. The scene in Bangkok is still small, and it’s still rife with problems like a lack of developers, lacking in people thinking globally or regionally, barriers outside of the urban areas, an isolated local and foreign population, and more. It’s all emerging out of a very recent political stability. But key elements have been waiting in the background for startups to rise up. The foundation is there.

Thailand’s open economy (which thus has drawn in lots of foreigners) and very cosmopolitan capital city of Bangkok has bred a strong middle class educated base to draw good ideas, execution, and business sense from. Although, it won’t be easy for everyone to transition to tech startups.

If you take a look at Thailand’s apps and websites, you’ll see that, in terms of design, they’re really nice. Why is that? It’s Thailand’s lucky exposure to MNCs and conglomerates contracting with local developers and companies. In contrast, Vietnam’s tech world is dominated by outsourcing, producing droves of developers but not companies that need to execute on the design and product front.

Many tech companies that you see in Thailand survive off of enterprise solutions, and with the novelty of the word “startup” coming in, some of them are transitioning to their own products. Not only is this because the enterprise world is drying up, but also because looking at consumer and global markets appears to be more lucrative. People in offline industries are considering tech solutions and tech companies are considering startup.

On top of all this, a steady stream of events has crept up on the community, everything from SIPA to Mekong ICT to INET to Women Startup event to Echelon to Tech in Asias Meetup to Startup Thailand. The discussions around the digital and online are diverse and multi-faceted.

In other words, Thailand is operating on top of what appears to be a very solid foundation. Whether or not this is a bubble and if it can maintain its momentum, we’ll see. But I’m betting we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

We know that cutesy sticker/emoticon packs are critical to the success of messaging apps in Asia – and they’re also a great way to monetize. That’s why Taiwan-made messaging app Cubie has teamed up with mobile payments service Fortumo to allow people to pay for these virtual stickers via their phone bill. Cubie has eight million users right now.

Cubie – which was recently incubated at 500 Startups – has rolled out this mobile payment system in 44 countries around the world, and reckons that it’ll be particularly useful in Southeast Asia where fewer people have credit cards, or are just generally wary of using them to buy things online. After quietly adding this in a few countries last week, Cubie’s James Hill says that it’s already noticeably helping:

Anecdotally, Fortumo say that by offering this service, companies can increase their revenues ten-fold – and so far we’ve seen a massive uplift in transactions from Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia, where we went live last week (as in one sticker pack brought in the same revenue in a day via Fortumo that our previous top seller did in its first week on just iTunes and Google Play). We will be sending a notification today telling the rest of our user base that they can also pay via their phone bills.

The payment screen will look like this:

Fortumo has worked with big-name game studios and social platforms to make mobile payments easier, such as Rovio (makers of Angry Birds), Facebook, and Badoo.

Cubie will add more countries in due course; James says they’re eagerly “waiting for approval from authorities in Canada, Ireland, and South Korea, which is standard as they take a bit longer”.

Among Cubie’s eight million users, the fastest growing markets are the US, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and Latin America.

Cubie’s large stickers and other cute features – the app also encourages doodling and drawing – have been copied by other popular apps in the region, such as WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk.

If you’re planning on traveling to Bangkok anytime soon it seems like a pretty useful service. I like night markets, so I clicked on that to filter down the available destinations, picked one, and then was able to check out a lot of high-res photos of the area, read some interesting information about its culture and history, and then browse through 28 room and house listings in the area. It’s fast, simple, and convenient.

So far there are 15 cities with this service, and though Bangkok is the first in Asia, we suspect it won’t be the last. In the meantime, travelers in Thailand would do well to check this out; it could be a way to find a place to stay that’s cheaper and closer to the things you really want to visit in the city.

Before we hear from organizer Andrew Tan about last year’s event and the kind of issues he wants to see startups tackling, these are the multi-country dates set for SI Camp Asia so far this summer:

• Bangkok, August 16 to 18 – with ChangeFusion and The Sync as partners
• Singapore, August 23 to2 5 – with Syinc and SWB
• Jakarta, August 30 to September 1 – with GEPI
• Manila, September 13 to 15 – with WebGeek
• Hong Kong, September 27 to 29 – with StartupHK and Bonza Pie
• Seoul, October 4 to 6 – with How2company
• Cebu and Kuala Lumpur are not yet set

As my Philippine-based colleague noted earlier today, SI Camp Asia is now taking submissions for civic startup ideas at its various city events.

Last year’s event saw six great ideas emerge from all across Asia. The eventual winner was Thatapp, which aims to help answer teens’ questions about sex. Sadly that app has not launched in the eight months since the event, something that raises the issue of civic startups who fail to tackle the issue at hand, perhaps due to a lack of funds or because it’s a side-project for those involved.

Seeking ideas across Asia

Last year the global SI Camp held only one event in Asia – and that was in Kuala Lumpur. So this year marks a big expansion for the program to eight cities in seven countries. Andrew Tan explains:

Last year was actually to set the foundation for this year. This year we wanted it to be held in different cities across Asia so that it is more accessible to people. We are still going to have a regional camp (SI Camp Asia) where we will bring the top teams from each of these local camps to Singapore.

Andrew encourages the do-good startups to think of issues seen in their particular country and to tackle those head-on:

I have always liked the saying “Think globally, act locally”. So startups should be focus on tackling issues that they either have experienced before, are affected by, or at the very least see everyday in their local environment. This is important because only by having first-hand experience of a problem can a startup have the insight to take the right first step, the drive and passion to go through the ups and down that any startup faces, and the sustaining energy to advocate for the issue that they are helping solve.

Also since a lot of the countries in Southeast Asia face similar issues mainly due to the fact that the infrastructure for things such as education, healthcare, and so on, are still under-developed. So the local solutions startups come up with will usually be adaptable to other countries.

credit to Casey Lau from SoftLayer

Last Sunday, we sat down with Dave McClure in Bangkok, along with the 500Startups team, and pick his brain on Southeast Asia.

Before getting into it, it’s worth noting that Dave’s been making the rounds across Asia very recently, with a fiery keynote at Hack Osaka in Japan, some insults and insights in Beijing, a hop over to Echelon, and finally a chat with us on Sunday. You can check out the full video below, but let me break down some cool points from Dave for you:

Dave’s pretty new to Southeast Asia, but he gave us some interesting insights into Asia proper. Dave thinks Singapore is a bit less interesting these days because of the conforming nature of the culture. Japan, on the other hand, is having trouble because of its low risk-taking culture. According to Dave, given that it’s such a strong internet culture, there’s a very low amount of startups. Whereas China, on the other hand, is very aggressive in that space, and, in a lot of ways, overvalued compared to Japan’s latent potential. And then Dave gave us some gems on Silicon Valley:

There’s a tendency to copy stuff in the US that looks sexy. Instagram exited with one billion, Pinterest currently valued at three billion, Tumblr for a billion. I don’t necessarily think fast growth social media platforms with no monetization are a great strategy outside of the US.

In other words, startups in Southeast Asia focusing on being the next Facebook or Twitter should think again. That’s exactly why Dave appreciates startups like Builk, which tackle real-world problems offline with technology solutions.

In terms of what could the Valley learn from Asia? Dave thinks gamification models from Korea and Japan were very compelling. He also mentioned the Valley is lazy toward internationalizing their apps and platforms, thus leaving a big opportunity for local startups to jump in and copy the models. People need to think globally sooner, and that’s certainly something that startups in Southeast Asia do compared to the Valley.

Dave also talked to us a bunch about advice for startups, but I’ll leave you with this:

If you’re always following the rules, then you have no advantages because everyone is following the rules…Entrepreneurship is about finding shortcuts that don’t kill you and get you in jail. Rule followers are at a disadvantage to people who are willing to take those shortcuts.”

BIG BONUS: Mimee from Thumbs Up, also gave us a 20-minute presentation on the Thai ecosystem, which will be really informative for folks interested in Thailand:

Not forgetting, a huge thank you to our awesome sponsors:

Corporate sponsors

VC sponsors

Startup sponsors

Thailand’s social media monitoring tool Zocial Inc today just announced its plan to expand to Indonesia through a joint venture partnership with media conglomerate MNC. The cooperation will see the Zocial team learning the Indonesian market through the guidance of MNC, as well as opening sales and service channels in the country.

Zocial Inc chose Indonesia as the first country to expand to. Naturally, because the country has excellent social media activities. Starting next month, the team will roll out its two social media monitoring tools ZocialEye and ZocialRank to Indonesian users. Furthermore, MNC plans to hold social media awards for individuals called the Zocial Award in the future.

The team explains their first priority would be to improve their own system like how they track customer behavior on social media sites. And afterwards, to localize their language system to the Indonesian language so that they can identify positive and negative sentiments more accurately.

It is interesting to note that the Indonesia expansion is just the company’s first step toward preparation for the upcoming ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Zocial plans to expand to other countries within the ASEAN region in the coming years. MNC, on the other hand, looks to be very welcoming to foreign startups with other joint ventures with China-based WeChat and the partnership with Japan-based e-commerce site Rakuten Belanja Online.

The ones who will be welcoming Zocial’s arrival in Indonesia are startups venturing in the same space here like NoLimit, MediaWave, and Brand24, to name a few. It’ll be interesting to see who will come out on top when it comes to understanding the Indonesian language. A few would argue that locals should know better, but the MNC partnership can definitely tilt the advantage to the Thai startup.

In April this year, Zocial was also part of our Startup Arena pitching battle at Startup Asia Singapore 2013.

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

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

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

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

True Corporation (TRUE:TB), the third largest mobile operator in Thailand, just announced its tech startup incubation program yesterday.

The True program is called Incube. It is not so different from the usual tech incubation programs: idea pitches, workshops, prototyping and meeting with possible funders. Winning teams will get a chance to work with various tech infrastructure platforms from True, and also get a course in the US at 500 Startups.

True is the latest Thai carrier in the mobile app incubation field. AIS and Dtac, number one and two in the mobile market, already launched their incubation program a few months ago. This makes 2013 the first time in Thailand where all three operators are involved in the startup scene.

Mobile mentoring

The latest Dtac Accelerate finalists, at the incubator run by telco Dtac.

AIS started its The StartUP program in 2011 and relaunched it again in 2013. The 2013 campaign already has five teams for the bootcamp stage (running to the end of July). AIS doesn’t have any US partner in the program but it has an extensive SingTel network in Asia as a strong advantage.

The Dtac campaign is called Dtac Accelerate, which has just selected the top 20 candidates for its workshop round (pictured above). The outstanding aspect of Dtac’s campaign is the guy who is in charge. Krating Poonpol is an ex-Googler who was in the original Google Earth team and has good links to the American tech startup ecosystem. Blackbox VC is Dtac’s foreign partner.

No choice but the telcos

The startup scene in Thailand is already dominated by these three big mobile operators. There are other incubation programs from other parties, both government (Thailand Software Park, SIPA, NSTDA) and private ventures. But the reach of these programs can’t match the big three’s marketing power.

Telcos offer tech startups money and advice, but also their established and extensive distribution/marketing network. For instance, Ookbee, Thailand’s largest e-bookstore, had much more reach after AIS bought a stake in 2012.

Inferior payment infrastructures in Thailand might be another reason supporting telcos campaigns. The majority of Thai consumers are afraid of credit card hacks (one of the country’s biggest urban myths) and prefer bank transfers when buying stuff online. This situation makes life tough for app makers who want revenue from direct payments. Carrier billing can be a good savior and going with one of the three telcos might be a good choice at the start.

Thailand is also lacking in big local tech companies. Besides some content portals (Tencent’s Sanook, Kapook, Mthai) and e-commerce (Rakuten’s Tarad), there is no broad platform company like Baidu, Tencent, Yahoo, SoftBank, or Naver in the country. All of popular online services in Thailand are from outside the nation: Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Line. There is no place for original Thai services for the mass market anymore. That’s why the telcos are the only natural choices for Thai startup wannabes.

There is no downside for the participants yet, though greater choice from a larger ecosystem – like in China, South Korea, Japan – would be ideal. Before the end of 2013, we will see the final outcome of these incubation programs and can decide whether they are the proper way to empower the tech startup ecosystem in the country.

This morning at e27’s Echelon conference, CEO and co-founder Mohan Belani announced that the company has made a strategic investment in Indonesian tech media site DailySocial, which is founded by Rama Mamuaya. In addition to that news, e27 is also establishing a joint-venture with Hubba in Thailand to form e27 Thailand.

There’s no press release as of yet. Only this from DailySocial which noted that what was written on April’s fool day is more or less what people can expect out of the investment/merger.

We have reached out to e27, DailySocial, and Hubba for comments and will update if we hear back.

(Image Credit: @dondyb)

It’s always nice to find teams across Asia that are working on very different problems from the usual mainstream mass market variety like chat apps. And I’m especially keen on startups that are looking at hardware and software solutions, like Setech Viet or Misfit Wearables who are looking ahead to the ‘internet of things’. So Penta is an especially cool company out of Thailand that combines hardware and software into the Pentabox.

The $150 Pentabox, as Mimee from Thumbs Up wrote in January, is basically a set top box that runs on Penta’s own operating system (built on top of Linux) and can plug into any screen. Thus, Penta works closely with companies to design new ways that it can be used in commercial, educational, and other undiscovered settings. The applications of the device, according to founder Jay Jootar, spans many industries and uses already:

Such as in classrooms, where you have a screen in front of the class with a lesson or games, then students with a tablet can interact with each other and the teacher. Another application is digital signage. One of our partners built an augmented reality digital signage with Penta connected to a screen and camera. People can walk in front of the screen and the digital signage will interact with them. They can try their clothes in front of a store with the screen.

So far Penta has been used with TV, games, outdoor kiosks, replacing PCs in internet cafes, and digital signage. But Jay says they’re mostly focusing on TV and digital signage, where the biggest markets are. So Jay considers the startup a B2B2B business and sometimes a B2B2C one.

World markets

Currently, Penta is mostly focusing on Thailand and Southeast Asia, but they’re also developing partnerships in the US, Switzerland, France, and China. China is a special case since one of the Pentabox investors and partners is Foxconn (yeah, that’s right, the guys who build lots of Apple gadgets). Penta currently has about 20 people working full-time and it’s actually one project of five that VC Group, Penta’s parent company, is working on.

For the far future, Jay is dreaming big:

In the beginning we target the “shared screen” application, but in the future, I think it will be beyond that. The internet of things, like any small device which needs intelligence, could be built with Penta. But that means Penta will also change the form factor to be smaller and consume less power.

Jay says that he got into this business because of his background in working at a telco. He realized that telcos need to offer more services on top of their pipes to differentiate themselves from other telcos.

So far, Penta has received about $2.5 million of initial funding and will be releasing its next product in the next few months.

To learn more about Penta, check out the video below:

Founded in 2010, Thailand-based restaurant review startup Wongnai has today announced that it has just concluded a Series A financing round from Japan’s Recruit Strategic Partners (RSP), a subsidiary of Recruit Holdings in Japan. The investment sum wasn’t disclosed.

With more than 500,000 downloads on the iTunes App Store and a database of 110,000 restaurants in Thailand, Wongnai claims to be the biggest restaurant review company in the country. Akihiko Okamoto, the president of RSP, says in today’s announcement that he expects Wongnai to become the dominant number one player in terms of Thailand restaurant reviews. Back in Japan, Recruit has the experience of running Hot Pepper which is a popular restaurant information and discount coupons website. The experience and guidance from Recruit should benefit Wongnai.

Wongnai CEO and co-founder Yod Chinsupakul said today:

While we are confident in our products, our team continues to work hard to get people what they look for: accurate restaurant information, quality reviews, and make it fun and easy to use. I am confident in this relationship. Recruit Holdings has track record of success running similar services in Japan. There are many things to be learned and experiences to be shared

With this investment, Yod told us that the company plans to expand outside of Bangkok but will still stay within Thailand. Wongnai currently has about 16 people in the team and plans to hire up to 23 by the end of this year.

Thailand-based entrepreneurial group Ardent Capital has wrapped up its first round of external funding. No funding amount has been revealed, but the investors are Siemer Ventures (USA), Recruit Strategic Partners (Japan), and GMO Venture Partners (Japan). Plus, as part of this round, Paul Santos from Singapore’s Wavemaker Labs will join the Ardent Capital board; Paul is also a partner at Siemer Ventures. (Updated: Corrected Ardent’s location).

The new funding will go towards both Ardent Labs as well as Ardent’s funding in more Southeast Asian startups.

Ardent Capital is itself also a VC firm that tends to focus on e-commerce and digital media. Ardent has made five investments to date: Sri Lankan daily deals site Anything.lk; Indonesian travel site Burufly; gamification platfom Playbasis; digital marketing analytics service Syndacast; and tech blog e27.

The firm’s internal product generator is Ardent Labs, which is the largest part of the business with its 40 personnel. Today’s anouncement points out:

Ardent Labs will launch its first two companies this quarter: WhatsNew, an e-commerce company that owns and operates several vertically focused e-commerce websites, and aCommerce. aCommerce provides end-to-end e-commerce solutions for startups, brands, retailers, and manufacturers in Southeast Asia.

Adrian Vanzyl, CEO of Ardent Capital, says that the group realizes the challenges in online purchasing for consumers in the region, and is also working to solve those with both its investments and its own companies:

We also know from personal experience that the challenges of operating in multiple markets with different cultures and languages, poor payment options, and unreliable logistics can be overwhelming. We are focused on solving these hard problems so we can remove the friction holding back pent up growth. This additional funding shows a clear validation of our model and allows us to accelerate our plans, team sizes and the number of countries we will operate in. With such strong support out of both Japan and the US, we have the capital to grow and provide our portfolio companies with a path for follow on investment, partnership, global growth and exits, giving them great support beyond Ardent.

The presence of two major Japanese investors is interesting, and could herald even more Japanese startups being guided towards the emergent Southeast Asian markets.

Vanzyl adds:

To leverage this investment, we are looking for three things: (1) entrepreneurs with companies or ideas looking for early to late stage seed funding with their core team and target customer base in Southeast Asia; (2) experienced entrepreneurs looking to join one of our companies, particularly CEO and senior executive candidates who can come in as co-founders to operate and grow the businesses created in our Labs group; and (3) established brands and companies looking to leverage our network and infrastructure to expand rapidly in, or enter, the Southeast Asian market.

That sounds like an offer and a plan.

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

Evernote Business notebooks in the app.

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

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

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

Thailand is one of Southeast Asia’s fastest developing and most promising internet markets. Currently, about 25 million Thais are online, and this figure is expected to reach 40 million to 50 million by 2015. Not only that, Thailand is addicted to social media: Bangkok is considered the world capital of Facebook when measured by the number of users in 2012. The e-commerce market, currently only about one percent of the total B2C retail market worth $95 billion, is expected to jump to three percent until 2015.

However, Thailand is not an easy playground for non-Thai companies. Strict investment regulations and the Thai language itself are just a few of the considerable number of barriers to entry. Many companies operating in Thailand, especially Western startups, struggle with issues unknown in their home markets: payments, logistics, supportive infrastructure, and corruption. In short, companies from other Southeast Asian countries might be much better equipped to enter the Thai market than large international players. Plus, once the barriers to entry are overcome – this already sizable and extremely fast growing market is easier to defend than most other internet markets.

Get Thai government on your side

The government, however, recognizes that certain areas should be promoted in order to attract more foreign business, capital, and knowledge. Luckily for us entrepreneurs, internet companies mostly fall into one of these promoted areas. The responsible government agency is the Board of Investment (BOI), Thailand’s official investment promotion agency.

For startups, primarily two chapters of the investment promotion regulations are of relevance: section 5.8 software development and section 5.9 for e-commerce. Both promotion categories allow for full foreign ownership, ease restrictions on the flow of capital, allow for much easier employment of non-Thai nationals, including some import duty exemptions on specialized equipment, and adds a guarantee from the Thai government of not being nationalized. In addition, chapter 5.8 grants the promoted company corporate income tax exemptions for up to eight years.

Unfortunately, also following the pressure from established local retail companies, the BOI decided to eliminate the investment promotion for e-commerce entirely and cut back the incentives for software development considerably. This will inevitably have negative effects on the newly emerging startup eco-system in Thailand. Especially external fund-raising is set to become even more challenging. However, startups wanting to enter the Thai market can still apply for an investment promotion under the old promotion regime before it expires. Regulations allow them to remain inactive up to 2.5 years after the investment promotion has been granted. Plenty of time in this fast evolving market.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

(Image credit: Flickr user Sigree Ibn Mamak)

Let’s take a look at the highlights from the infographic (the full thing is embedded at bottom) and the newest statistics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, and Line.

Facebook in Thailand

Zoning in on Facebook, the ZocialInc crew finds that the peak time for posting is 11pm. These are the demographics within Thailand:

Twittery Thais

There are now two million Thais on Twitter, who on average tweet 5.5 times each day. Like with Facebook, the country’s Twitterers are night owls, tending to post more between 10pm and midnight. 66.7 percent of Twitter posts in Thailand are made on mobiles.

YouTube boom

YouTube is still seeing great growth in Thailand, and is now up to 630,000 channels within the nation, adding up to 5.3 million videos uploaded by Thai users. The top video cateogry for these guys and girls is music.

Snapping up Instagram

With the most stellar growth in Thailand in the past year, Instagram is now up to 600,000 users in the country, up from 150,000 this time last year. In the first four months of 2013, they collectively posted 21.38 million photos. One of the most liked users is @aum_patchrapa, the beauty queen turned actress Pachrapa ‘Aum’ Chaichua.

Checking out of Foursquare?

Foursquare, the location-based service, saw a nine percent drop in check-ins in the past year in Thailand, but the number of venues grew. The best growth figure for Foursquare was that 55 percent more people checked in via Instagram.

Line up

There are no Thailand-specific numbers from WeChat for Thailand, so let’s focus on rival app Line, which has a pretty spectacular 15 million Thai users. It’s also an important new platform for social marketing and brands outreach, with the top Thai brand on Line having 4.6 million followers already.

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

The move reflects mobile developer Quan Inc’s desire to expand into Southeast Asia. The partnership with AIS may also give Quan an opportunity to develop future apps for SingTel customers, as SingTel is a stakeholder in AIS.

The news is also a reflection of the growing popularity of chat apps like Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat in Southeast Asia, and the ecosystems that are cropping up around them as they move away from being standalone chat apps and towards being full-fledged platforms.

Disclosure: East Ventures, one of Quan Inc.’s investors, is also an investor of Tech in Asia. Read our ethics page for more information.

According to Tencent Games, Korean Game publisher Liveplex has inked a deal with Thailand’s SBT to bring its risque MMORPG Queen’s Blade Online to the country for the first time. Queen’s Blade Online, also sometimes called Scarlet Blade, has previously expanded into Japan, Taiwan, and China.

Like most MMORPGs, Queen’s Blade Online is apparently mostly a monster-killing grind, but unlike most MMORPGs its characters are mostly women (and disturbingly, one young girl) wearing some of the skimpiest outfits imaginable (yes, I know a lot of games have women in absurd outfits, but Queen’s Blade takes it to another level). I haven’t actually played it, but based on the videos I have seen, the dev team seems to have spent a lot of time on its, ahem, bouncing physics.

Whether you find this kind of game titillating or creepy, it’s hard to deny that it sells, and very soon, it will likely be selling in Thailand. But I challenge even the most dedicated giant-digital-boobs enthusiast to watch the last minute of this video (NSFW, obviously), which features some of the game’s leading ladies dancing spastically to club music, and not cringe.

(via QQ Games)

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

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

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

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

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”).

Last Friday, Sina Weibo quietly announced that it would be entering Thailand thanks to a partnership with Thai company Jiaranai Entertainment. Weibo Thailand is aiming to break even within six months and generate more than $1 million in revenue in its first year. It aims to have 1.6 million active users in Thailand by the end of the year.

Admittedly, I am not all that familiar with the Thai market, but this sounds like an absolute pipe dream. Generating some revenue is one thing — Thailand is a popular destination for Chinese tourists and I’m sure some Thai businesses will appreciate the chance to get in closer contact with their customers — but 1.6 million active users in a year seems like a stretch, especially for a service that (as of this moment) doesn’t even have a Thai language option. (In fact, the service didn’t even have English until earlier this year).

Twitter, which has been in Thailand for years, currently has between 1.5 million and 2 million users in the country by most counts, and I don’t see any reason why Sina Weibo is likely to be any more popular or pick up users any faster. That is especially true given that Jiaranai’s strategy seems very focused on picking up corporate accounts that want to interact with Chinese users, not on getting regular people to use the service. Are there really 1.6 million Thai businesses that are aching to microblog with potential customers in Chinese?

More broadly, I have to wonder what the hell took Sina so long. Baidu has been expanding into Southeast Asia and researching there since last year. Tencent’s WeChat is all over the world map and has already racked up 40 million overseas users. If Sina wanted Weibo to go international, they should have made this move years ago while the concept was still trendy. I still believe that aside from the censorship, Weibo actually offers a superior service to Twitter. But why give Twitter years to get entrenched in Southeast Asia before finally dipping a toe into the Thai market at a time when microblogging seems threatened by the rising popularity of mobile chat apps?

If Sina was going to go global, the company should have moved much faster and much more decisively, especially into Southeast Asia. This is not to say that there is no opportunity at all for Weibo outside China, of course, but Sina has taken so long to take the market outside of China seriously that its hard to imagine the company having much success there at this point even if it did throw its weight behind a global push. (And since Jiaranai is only looking to spend about $300,000 marketing Weibo Thailand, it certainly doesn’t seem like Sina’s full weight is even behind this Thai push).

China’s market is huge, of course, and it’s possible to make a lot of money without ever stepping outside it (although historically Sina Weibo has struggled to make the kind of money one might expect from a platform with so many users). But I have a feeling that a year from now, Sina’s executives are going to be looking at a less-than-ideal situation with Weibo Thailand, and perhaps wondering how things might have gone differently if the company had taken Southeast Asia more seriously earlier in the game.

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)

Founded by journalist and entrepreneur Byron Perry in September 2011, Coconuts Media, a local review and news media company, started with the domain name CoconutsBangkok.com. Today, Perry’s site uses the sweet sounding domain name Coconuts.co. Coupled with the new URL, Coconuts Media also presents a newly baked responsive web design.

Perry also shared that Coconuts Media has recently received funding from angel investors in Silicon Valley but declined to disclose the funding amount or names. From my understanding, a significant chunk of the investment was invested on the Coconuts.co domain name and also on its new design. “We wanted to combine the sites under one URL because it’s much more scalable,” says Perry.

With a team of ten, split between seven in Bangkok and three in Manila, Coconuts Media currently covers stories in Bangkok and Manila. Its Singapore site is scheduled to launch within the next two months. On Coconuts.co, you will find stories ranging from local news, commentaries, tech, to food reviews. He told me, “We want to launch in several other cities in Southeast Asia before the end of the year.”

Inspired by Buzzfeed and Vice, Coconuts Media plans to monetize solely from advertising but focusing more on advertorial/sponsored content rather than banner ads. To date, Coconuts Media has a total of 79,000 unique visitors generating 206,000 pageviews each month. In the near future, Coconuts Media is exploring more ways to inspire its users to produce more user-generated content to keep the site as locally centric as possible.

Next up at Startup Arena is Pombai, a Bangkok-based startup that provides transport companies with an online ticketing system. In Thailand, city-to-city bus tickets are mostly purchased at the station counter or from agents – all of which is inconvenient.

Pombai’s idea is to create an online ticketing system to manage and sell transport companies’ inventory of spare tickets. It’s similar to Redbus in India, which is apparently doing very well.

But as a startup, it is hard to convince transport companies to entrust their inventories to Pombai. To kickstart his business, founder Joseph Finkenbinder started by buying tickets from bus companies and selling them online. It didn’t make Pombai any profit but it did validate that there is real demand. Finkenbinder says that there are more than 1,200 bus companies in Thailand with five major players holding 47 percent market share. The entire Thai bus transportation industry is worth $1.03 billion right now. In addition to its consumer-side site, Pombai is also making a business out of putting any transport ticketing systems online.

Pombai took part in Startup Bootcamp in Dublin last year and got $60,000 seed funding. His team is made up of people from Lithuania, Nepal, China, and Thailand. The site is available in three languages – Thai, Chinese, and English. Finkenbinder says that the same transport ticketing problem can also be found in China and Vietnam and is hopeful that Pombai can one day expand there in the near future.

One of the judges, Andrew Collins, from Mailman Group, says to Joseph after his demo that he’s concerned that there aren’t enough Thai people working at this startup. In such a culturally diverse country from the US/west, Andrew feels that more local input is needed.

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

The shopping discounts app ShopKick has proved to be popular, and now Bangkok-based SocialHappen wants to bring the same model to Thai consumers.

The SocialHappen app lets users find nearby discounts and promotions at participating retailers. It also has a gamified form of location-based check-ins whereby shoppers earn points and virtual badges for walking into a store. It might even earn you a gift – that’s because the startup puts gashapon toy machines into stores. Of course, it’s questionable if these toys are good enough for some consumers.

SocialHappen’s app is currently in development. Pitching to the panel of judges at our Startup Asia even in Singapore this afternoon, founder Charkrid Thanhachartyothin explained that it’s aiming to solve a real problem for smaller retailers.

As with all retail-reliant apps like this, it’s only as good as the brick-and-mortar partners that it has. If there’s not enough in the way of shopping options and useful discounts, then users will look elsewhere. But this Thai startup has plenty of retail experience, having also made ShopWeLike as a platform for Facebook stores.

The judges are concerned about accessibility – shoppers must download the app, and the startup needs to persuade retailers. Charkrid says that its gashapon machines use internal, in-store wifi so there’s no need to use GPS or QR codes or other complex things. Judge Jeffrey Paine says he feels that SocialHappen needs a hook and doesn’t really have an enticing pull right now. Later this afternoon we’ll see which of our 20 startups wins over the judges.

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

Our Startup Asia Singapore 2013 event, which wraps up today, has been focusing on Southeast Asia. So it’s an opportune moment to get some insights from a local blogger. Oranuch “Mimee” Lerdsuwankij from Thumbsup.in.th is next onstage with a slideshare presentation about the Thai startup scene (embedded below). Here’s the live blog:

#14:06: Internet penetration is finally up to about 30 percent. Facebook is the top photo site.

#14:06: For telco’s non-voice revenue is up to 24 percent as more phone users jump on social and other messaging apps.

#14:07: Forecast for 7.5 million Android phones in Thailand by end of 2013. Market share will be 68 percent on Android this year, 18 percent on iPhone/iOS.

#14:09: The main VCs: inVent, ArdentCapital, M8VC, and Sparx. Now there are a good few incubators and other co-working spaces.

#14:10: InVent has funded Ookbee, the huge e-book platform we’ve often discussed on this site.

#14:11: As for Ardent, it has backed Burufly, Komli Media, Ensogo, and lots of other important sites in the region, not just in Thailand.

#14:12: With credit card penetration so low (about 15 percent of adults), bank transfers are still the way to monetize, with about 80 million bank accounts in the country. E-payments are growing, and some emphasize non-credit cards support. Look out for PayBuy, 2C2P, and TrueMoney.

#14:16: As in much of Southeast Asia, poor internet structure and a lack of trust in e-payments represent two major stumbling blocks for both startups and major web companies.

#14:18: Looking at one local success story, how did Ookbee get so big? It has built itself on partnering with publishers of paper/offline content. Plus it did this early.

#14:20: Another fine example is Builk, which is a business social network focused on the construction industry (see page 37 on the slideshow to see how it monetizes).

#14:22: Digio is a homegrown alternative to Square, which turns the smartphone into a mobile POS. It has partnered with Kasikorn bank to offer mobile payments. Again, an offline partnership has boosted a Thai startup.

#14:23: What’s next for Thailand? The new 2.1GHz 3G spectru, will finally make 3G mobile data more mainstream around the country. Mimee says that the funding is not the problem. Instead startups need more coaching and skills. “This is the time for incubators to help – and for foreigners to come into the startup community”. Indeed, one of our Startup Arena competitiors later is based in Bangkok but run by an American – look out for it later this afternoon.

#14:25: That’s the sharing session done. See Mimee’s slideshow below:

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.

Currently onstage now is the founder of Thailand’s e-commerce site Tarad.com, Pawoot Pongvitayapanu or Pom. Interviewed by Willis Wee, Pom talks about the lessons he learned after Japan-based e-commerce giant Rakuten bought a majority stake of Tarad in 2009.

#15:02: Tarad is a marketplace and it was started in 2001. Pom said that it was the worst time to start a business because Thailand was having a crisis then.

#15:05: Pom said that – if based on newspaper reports – Rakuten bought majority stake on Tarad for US$3 million. He said that everything changed after Rakuten came in. Now that they’re working with Rakuten, everything has to be in numbers, everything has to be punctual. “We have morning meeting, each team has daily communication, and every person has to submit report every day,” said Pom.

#15:07: KPI tree is important, we break down our target numbers like traffic and buyer convertion. Each KPI belongs to each department, and each department’s KPI is broken down to each person.

#15:09: You can download Pom’s KPI spreadsheet through his personal website Pawoot.com. But it needs some translation effort.

#15:12: Most people work for money, but if you’re working for another reason which is bigger like to empower the society, it is better as you are more purpose-driven. “Rakuten made us believe that we can grow and change the lives of the society and country. It is important to us.” Before getting acquired, Pom didn’t have that way of thinking.

#15:14: Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani inspired Pom. “If you’re working in Rakuten, you know everything.” It is because the employees always communicate with each other every day.

#15:17: It was very hard to convince people to shop online, but after getting acquired by Rakuten, credit card has become the majority of online payment method on Tarad. If Pom had the chance to do it all over again, he would run his company just like Rakuten does.

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.

This evening, we are pleased to have a panel of distinguished guests from Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam to give us an insight on Singapore’s neighbouring markets. Held at Biopolis, tonight’s sharing and networking session is a prelude to tomorrow’s Startup Asia Singapore conference involving speakers:

• Reza, FOWAB in Bandung, representing Indonesia startup scene

• Mimee, Thumbsup, representing Thailand startup scene

• Mike Tran, Keewi, representing Vietnam startup scene

(The liveblog will auto-update below)

You may not have heard of Sanook, but by internet standards, the company is a grizzled veteran in Thailand, founded by Poramate Minsiri way back in 1998. Over the years it has expanded to offer a number of services and products, including e-commerce, games, news content, advertising, and mobile applications. Today, it is the largest web portal in Thailand.

The company’s e-commerce arm includes Dealfish, a C2C e-commerce marketplace and Sabuy, and B2B2C e-commerce site. This division is led by managing director Tiwa York. The internet portal section and other divisions like mobile, games, and advertising are led by Krittee Manoleehagul, the managing director at Sanook Online Limited.

Part-owned by Tencent and MIH

Sanook started as a Thai-based web directory in 1998 under parent company MWEB. After just a year, MWEB was acquired by MIH Group (under Nasper) (1).

In 1999, the Thai company rebranded fully to Sanook and placed every entity under the single domain of Sanook.com. Back in the 90s, there wasn’t any Thai language portal, and portal sites were really the big thing in the internet business. It took off, and in August 2010, Tencent bought 49.92 percent of Sanook.com. At that time, Sanook.com had about 13 million monthly unique visitors generating 400 million pageviews a month.

Sanook, Mobile, and WeChat

Today Sanook.com boasts a whopping 18.5 million monthly unique visitors generating over 500 million pageviews each month. It has its own editorial team but also syndicates content via other web sources as well.

Krittee says that the top three priorities of his department are WeChat, Sanook.com, and mobile. He estimated that there are about 10 to 15 million smartphone users, about 20 percent of the Thai market, and that number will continue to grow over time. Moving with the mobile trend in Thailand, he says that some of the most popular content on the Sanook portal (like horoscopes, news, and restaurant reviews) are now available on app stores. Krittee adds:

Tiwa and I started looking at certain verticals and said, “Look, this has potential let’s pull it out.” […] Like restaurant reviews, eventually who knows, we might be able to develop it into a business where users can book in advance through the application. [It’s more than just] reviews, you can do more than that.

Tiwa York (Left) and Krittee Manoleehagul (right)

Working with WeChat

The Thai internet giant also runs the mobile messaging app WeChat in Thailand as Sanook is partly owned by Tencent, one of the largest internet companies in China.

For Sanook, working with brands is one of the key strategies they believe can add value for Thai users. Krittee cities Thai beverage giant Chang as an example, the brand that provides utility convenience to its users through WeChat. Users can order deliveries from Chang (E.g. Water refills), a classic case of online-to-offline engagement through mobile.

From a business point of view, Sanook does not only provide online engagement through WeChat for brands. It provides more of a holistic online marketing platform by offering advertising media on its portal. It also helps manage the brand’s Facebook page through Sanook-owned ad agency, Top Space.

We just started this (WeChat engagement) at the end of last year. I don’t think the brands [in Thailand] really understand this whole concept yet. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We see ourselves as marketing consultants […] making them think about the customer lifecycle and how to reach their customers across every touch point.

Krittee said that the number of WeChat users in Thailand “is in the millions” but declined to give an exact figure.

Games are also another one of Sanook’s key verticals. Right now Sanook does Flash and social games but Krittee doesn’t believe that it’s the future. Mobile games will be its focus. Sanook licenses game content and localizes it for the Thai market. WeChat, as faithful readers know, is working on a mobile gaming platform but Sanook’s games won’t be on the platform right away. Krittee is careful not to be overly reliant on WeChat and doesn’t want to start plugging too many things into WeChat just yet.

E-commerce: Sabuy and Dealfish

Sabuy and Dealfish are the two key e-commerce divisions under Sanook. Dealfish, Sanook’s C2C marketplace, was established as a standalone website in September 2011. According to local web analytics site Truehits, Dealfish attracts more than 250,000 unique visitors each day and has an average of 240,000 listings (with a 45 days auto-expiry) generated by 213,000 sellers.

Dealfish works more like a Craigslist rather than something like Taobao — meaning it does not facilitate transactions between users. Embracing social, Dealfish allows cross posting from Facebook to its marketplace listings. The service also has city/region-level listings. For example, chiangmai.dealfish.co.th allows users to view all the listings from Chiang Mai only.

The site is currently free to use, although Tiwa does have plans to implement a freemium model for more serious sellers on Dealfish. But monetization is not yet on his list of priorities. He tells me:

The whole role of business (for Dealfish) is to connect and activate local commerce. Our vision of the business is just that. That’s why we are not in the hurry to monetize. We want to actively provide a great service where people can trade.

Tiwa also revealed that Dealfish will soon roll out its mobile application which inevitably seems to be a direct competition with Shopspot.

In addition to Dealfish, Sanook also has its B2B2C e-commerce property called Sabuy, which is home to more than 1,400 merchants with 210,000 products listed. Sabuy was first launched in November 2007 in a partnership with eBay. After the partnership expired at the end of 2011, Tiwa and his team rebranded it to Sabuy and ran the e-commerce site under the Sanook brand.

We wanted to take the Sabuy business in a certain direction, and we have a vision for being a brightly lit mall model that is safe for all buyers.

The rebranding of Sabuy in late 2011 was also coupled with the Sabuy Guarantee, which promises no defects or late deliveries. Sabuy is also strict when selecting retailers to work with, making sure they are able to meet with Sabuy’s standards of service. In Thailand, Sabuy’s closest competitor is Rakuten’s Tarad.com.

According to Sabuy’s own figures, 35 percent of its customers use ATM and internet bank transfer, and 35 percent pay through counters or at 7-Eleven. The remaining 30 percent pay using credit cards. Two-thirds of all Sabuy’s orders are from outside of Bangkok.

“Our job is to take Sanook to the next level,” said Krittee.

As my interview with Tiwa and Krittee ended, I heard some Sanook staffers singing a birthday song for one of their team members. Tiwa and Krittee walked out of the meeting room to pass on their birthday wishes, mixing naturally with the rest of the staffers. The party went on as I headed off.

Sanook’s culture feels right for an internet company. And its future looks solid under the leadership of Tiwa and Krittee.

(1) MIH Group invests in promising companies in emerging markets. In Asia alone, it owns part of Tencent (China), Ibibo (India), Tokobagus (Indonesia), Mulitply (Indonesia), and many more.

Image credit: abaf.asia

Serial entrepreneur Paul Srivorakul (pictured), who founded and exited Admax and Ensogo, was born in Thailand, has lived in the Philippines and Singapore, and grew up in the US. After he graduated from UC Berkley, Paul started working at Ask.com in a sales position in 2000, his first dip into the world of internet business.

On a vacation to Thailand with his brother, Paul sensed great opportunity in the country. He decided to call quits at Ask.com and relocated to Thailand. Two of his elder brothers followed shortly. He spent three months teaching himself Dreamweaver and Flash, and then with his brother, John Srivorakul, founded Impaq Interactive, a web development outsourcing firm.

In a year, Impaq grew from two to 20 people in the team. Paul explains to us that Impaq also started to venture into online advertising and became the official ad reseller for Microsoft (on Hotmail, MSN) in Thailand. Under Impaq, Microsoft’s advertising revenue from Hotmail and MSN in Thailand grew from $100,000 to $2.5 million within a year. Paul’s experience as a reseller with Microsoft got him thinking that Impaq could also help other publishers to sell their ad inventories.

“Er… What’s a banner ad?”

And so he did, creating a simple ad network where publishers will embed their codes for banner ads to be inserted and run automatically. Paul shared how tough it was to educate clients back then. They would ask questions like “What’s a banner ad?” and “Where will it be linked to?” Paul also quickly realized that most of the potential clients who he spoke to didn’t even have a website to start with. So Paul and his brother set up Newmedia in 2004, an ad agency to help manage all of these clients. With Impaq and Newmedia, Paul could serve its clients from creating websites, creating ad creatives, and managing their ad budget. Besides being a reseller for Microsoft, Newmedia also became a reseller for Yahoo in most countries in Southeast Asia.

Paul had the idea of owning the digital advertising space in Southeast Asia. He established Digital Marketing Solution (DMS) Group in 2005 which housed Newmedia, Impaq, and also the ad network business, Admax. DMS Group raised $12 million led by Softbank and IDG Ventures to build and scale Admax. In three years, Admax had over 100 people and expanded to six different countries. Paul was the CEO initially but believed that he needed to bring in someone who can take the company to the next level. He told me:

I was so overwhelmed, I was under 30 and I was managing the COO and CFO and different business units. [Back then] I didn’t have strong management experience even though my management team was really good. I realized that I needed to find a guy that can actually take [Admax] to the next level.

In 2008, he brought in Grant Watts, an ex-Yahoo and Microsoft regional manager to take over his role as CEO. It turned out that Watts was the right man to lead the ship. Admax was acquired by Komli Media in February 2011. In the same year, Newmedia, which was then part of Edge Marketing, was acquired by STW Group in December 2011.

Image credit: Ardent Capital’s blog

Next up, Ensogo

With a good management team running Admax, Paul and his brothers left to start Ensogo, a coupon discount site, in 2010. The Srivorakul brothers — Paul, Tom, and John — together chipped in $200,000 to start the business. When Ensogo first launched, Paul expected to have just 500 orders a month. But somehow it ended up with 1,000 orders in the very first day and soon revenue was doubling month on month. The most amazing thing, Paul said, was that they were able to calculate how much money they could make for every marketing dollar spent. Ensogo was testing banner ads to experiment which ad creative gives the highest yield. He said:

We never approach the daily deal space as like an e-commerce play. We approached it like advertising. Not just to advertise but also to drive them to purchase.

Image credit: Paul Srivorakul’s Picasa

Apparently, the Srivorakul brothers’ nine years of experience in advertising and media have brought them the needed expertise to catalyze Ensogo’s growth. One big misunderstanding that many people have about Ensogo is that it is a group buying business. It’s not. Rather, Ensogo is more like a coupon discount site which doesn’t require a group of users to band together before the purchase is triggered.

It wasn’t a mature payment system then. [We thought group-buying] is too confusing […] just 50 percent discount, you buy it and get it.

Growth was so good that investors were knocking at Ensogo’s door. Eventually Ensogo went with Berlin-based daily deal expert Rebate Networks who invested $2 million. Paul was advised to spend the investment within five months as a land-grab strategy. Profit wasn’t a priority – growth and market share were the aims, and it paid off. In June 2011, U.S-based LivingSocial acquired Ensogo. After some number guessing, I deduce that the acquisition sum should be above $30 million but Paul declined to give an exact figure.

Leaving Livingsocial

After the acquisition, Paul stayed at Livingsocial for a year before starting Ardent Capital, a fund focusing on e-commerce or related businesses in Southeast Asia. The fund has so far invested in Burufly, Anthing.lk, e27, and Playbasis. He said:

First year for me [in Livingsocial] was good enough. [There is] too much opportunity. For me it wasn’t about the money. It’s about building value, building companies and being part of that process.

Speaking about failures, Paul shared two experiences. In 2006 he was involved in an online jobs classified and referral program startup called Yellow. It raised over $4 million but couldn’t get any traction and was shut down in 2010. Another failed startup, Earthhop, which hoped to be the Expedia for Southeast Asia, didn’t go well either and was in the deadpool within two years. Though Paul wasn’t part of the management team, he humbly considers both cases as part of his failures.

His tips for success?

Figure out what is the real problem and it’s always the hard problems. Be very clear on what you want to do with your company before you even build it.

The world’s top messaging apps might have over half a billion users between them, but plenty of startups still see room for growth – especially in Asia. That’s the case with Finland-based Jongla (pronounced “yong-ler”), which launched in December and is now seeing strong uptake in the region, particularly in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Australia.

Available for iPhone, Android, and as a HTML5 web app, Jongla CEO Riku Salminen tells us that the team is encouraged by the “involved, hardcore” users they’re seeing in Asia and plan to open an office in Asia in the second half of this year. The messaging app is aimed at users globally, but Riku reckons that the specially commissioned artwork in its animated emoticon packs is proving particularly popular in this region. The next version of the iPhone app will add language support for Vietnamese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Korean, and all that is in the newest Android iteration already.

Facing competition from the likes of WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, Whatsapp, and newcomers like US-made MessageMe, Riku believes that they’re strong rivals but they’re mainly “good for getting users at home”. Instead, Jongla wants to be truly international and inclusive. The Finnish startup sees many ways that can happen: with quality content, a growing in-app store, and being ready to roll with HTML5 once Firefox OS hits the market.

I get the impression that the Jongla store is going to be used for a lot more than just sticker packs – such as its latest range featuring the Scandinavian classic cartoon Moomins – and that content publishing might be on the horizon as well. Though unable to reveal specific plans, Riku concedes the store will be used for “any content, including localized” stuff, and he says they’ll “sell any other content that’s relevant to users”. We’ve seen KakaoTalk do this recently with a new publishing platform that, for now, is limited to Korean content.

As chat apps evolve, it’s possible that they’ll come to be defined by their ancillary services – Line for games and as a broader social network, KakaoTalk for social gaming, Cubie for doodling and drawing, WeChat for (maybe) a mobile wallet and much more in future, and Whatsapp for… er… ummm… something.

Indeed, such accompanying feature-sets will likely be crucial to survival. So we look forward to seeing where Jongla takes its content, and how its user-base in Asia and around the world reacts to that.

Grab Jongla for iPhone or Android, and there’s a Windows Phone version coming soon.

Wanchat Padungra, Founder at Pantip / Image credit: @Wanchat

Founded in 1997, Pantip.com is the largest online discussion forum in Thailand with 30 million unique visitors a month. The man who founded the popular website in Thailand is Wanchat Padungrat.

In 1995, Padungrat started a computer peripheral trading business with his friend that operated between Taiwan and Thailand. His Taiwanese suppliers told him that it was much better to use email to discuss dealings (prior to using email, he had been using fax). Padungrat recalled that his first ISP in Thailand was KSC internet which provided an email service with 120 minutes of internet usage each month. Padungrat realized that even after using email there were still a lot of minutes left. Instead of wasting them, Padungrat installed Netscape and roamed around the internet. He was very impressed with its content and thought that Netscape was actually the internet.

While feeling impressed with the world wide web, Padungrat bemoaned the lack of Thai content. That got him inspired to build a Thai-language website, Pantip.com, which started off as an online magazine in 1997. He hired some writers for two to three months, but the website unfortunately didn’t take off. Padungrat wasn’t satisfied and added in classified listings to try his luck at that. He noticed that geeks were using his classifieds site to buy and sell computer parts so he created a computer and gadget listing site which saw some traction. Thus was the so-called 1.0 Pantip kick-started as an online magazine with classified listings.

Inspired by an email

One event that inspired Padungrat was during a conversation with a doctor via email. The doctor sent him an email and suggested that his website was interesting but that he could add in sound to make it more engaging. Padungrat replied and asked how can he make that possible. The doctor then sent him two paragraphs of instructions on how he could do it.

While the idea wasn’t great on hindsight, Padungrat said that he was inspired by how the internet can empower idea sharing. He went online and started searching for a platform that could host threaded conversations (back then, the word ‘forum’ probably wasn’t too widely used on the web). Padungrat couldn’t find any solution that worked to his liking. He wanted a forum platform that was simple and could be viewed by simply scrolling up and down. With no luck finding such a platform, he created his own.

The initial boom

Internet users were scarce in the late 90s. There wasn’t SEO, SEM, or social media marketing. Many people didn’t know about or feared the internet. To convert non-internet people into internet users, Padungrat started with traditional advertising for his site, placing ads in computer magazines and giving away brochures at computer-related events. Pantip didn’t do traditional advertising for long. Once users got to know Pantip, they started to help spread the word. Back then, there weren’t many websites in Thai so naturally Pantip became one of the go-to online destinations.

While it started as a computer and geeky forum, Padungrat noticed that people were also talking about politics. People debated their differing views on Pantip, which drew in even more users. Seeing the opportunity, Padungrat created a dedicated thread for users who wanted only to read or comment on political issues. Pantip’s user-generated content became more diverse as it added in more topics like teens and automobiles. When Pantip started, it only had 200 visitors a day. Fast forward 18 months and Pantip had hit 6,000 visitors each day.

Making money through ads

While the growth was great, money was still needed to pay the bills. 15 years ago, Padungrat lamented, most media buyers weren’t looking at the internet for media placements. Whenever he called ad agencies, they usually referred him to the media buyers who knew little about the web.

Things started to change when Intel Australia decided to buy ad spots on Pantip. Padungrat said that that was one of the turning points for Pantip. Intel, as a strong brand, caught the attention of many ad agencies who started to look at the internet more closely for media placements.

In the two years after Pantip was founded, investors and buyers were knocking at Padungrat’s door hoping to invest in the fast-growing Thai internet company. Unlike most internet entrepreneurs, Padungrat didn’t take the bait. The conservative entrepreneur felt that things were okay running as it is. He told me:

Maybe I’m too conservative. I don’t believe that internet [business] needs a lot of money to run. Because we can do internet business with a very small [investment].

Today, Pantip is still 100 percent owned by Padungrat.

The new Pantip

After more than a decade sticking to the design and infrastructure first created by Wanchat Padungrat, Pantip finally changed its design earlier this year. The change took about 18 months to complete.

Padungrat said that the new design and underlying technology helps to reduce load, runs faster, and reduces server costs. Written from scratch, the new Pantip makes the site more agile and scalable. Adding in new features is now much easier; for example, its community groups feature could be implemented only thanks to the new technology. The new interface also allows users to customize their own pages. Padungrat is excited about the future of Pantip and its new infrastructure, but declined to share more on future product features.

Does Pantip have any exit plans? Not really. Padungrat’s goal is still very much building an organization to serve customers better. An IPO is unacceptable for Padungrat because it cannot be guaranteed that investors will take users’ happiness as their first priority.

From 1997 to now, Pantip grew from a one-man to a 50-man team. Pantip commands one million unique visitors each day. Besides its online discussion forum, Pantip also runs Pantipmarket.com, a classified listings marketplace, with 180,000 unique visitors per day. Pantown is a customizable online forum engine for users. BlogGang is a blog content management system (like WordPress) that competes with Exteen.

As a CEO, I try to do as little as possible. Like Pantipmarket, once the manager can do everything, I rarely touch on that. I’m too old, around 50, and I can’t catch up with the new technology and it’s time for the new generation. They understand our users better and are close to the current technology because they grow up with it.

Fourleaf is a Thailand-based startup that helps hotels to create beautiful looking menus on iPads. So, instead of browsing through the usual paper menu, Fourleaf is able to put all these menus — for room services, food menus, TV programs, etc. — on the iPad. Having recently raised THB 1 million ($34,000) angel funding, co-founder Nattapon Nimakul told me that his company is now testing its solution with two hotels in Krabi and Phuket.

For every iPad menu issued (every hotel room will have one), Fourleaf charges the hotel $100 to $170 per month. That’s quite costly, so Fourleaf is only going after four- or five-star hotels. On the surface, Fourleaf’s iPad menus are just another pretty way to impress customers. But there are actually several benefits in using its service.

By digitizing menu content and order processes, it allows the hotel to collect and analyze data to improve revenue from room service. Fourleaf also provides a real-time dashboard for hotel clients to make sense out of the data collected. If any changes need to be made in the menu, it can be done immediately across all hotels by changing content hosted in the cloud.

Last week, Chang, the largest beverage producer in Thailand (most famous for its beer) joined Tencent’s WeChat with an official account. While most folks think that official accounts (sort of like a brand page on Facebook) are just a way for companies to push messages and communicate with consumers/fans, it is actually more than that.

Chang takes the name “WeChang” on Wechat. Once you follow WeChang within the WeChat messaging app, you will receive a welcome message with simple instructions on how to use WeChang to order home deliveries of its drinking water via WeChat.

To order water refills, reply ‘2’ with the following text: ‘waterrefill#customer name#your number’. A customer service representative will confirm the order before delivering the water to your doorstep. Or customers can reply ‘3’ to download a set of cutesy Chang stickers (pictured above).

It’s hard not to like such conveniences. In China, the China Merchant’s Bank allows its followers to check their bank balance through WeChat. More can be done in future, I think. For example, it will be great to be able to order food home deliveries, pay utility bills, or book restaurant or movie tickets on WeChat while on the move.

If WeChat or any other chat apps can bring more utility functions to users on mobile, it will create yet another compelling reason for people to sign up – even if users download the app just to access those utility features and not to chat with friends.

Last night at Tech in Asia’s Bangkok Meetup, Evernote’s Tiang Lim Foo, Asia Pacific Market Development, took the hot seat for more than 40 minutes for an interview followed by a lively discussion with the audience. During the interview, Tiang revealed several interesting things. In Southeast Asia, Evernote has close to two million users and the Thailand user base is growing fast, now at 400,000 users. Last month, we noted that Evernote has 350,000 users in Indonesia, too.

An Evernote PR representative told us that Evernote is noticing sharp growth in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The growth in Thailand has been pretty impressive. Compared to its Thailand user count two years ago, Evernote has increased its users by 1,200 percent. In the last three months, Thailand has added 21,500 new users on average per month.

Globally, Evernote has 50 million users with about two-third of its users outside of the United States. In Asia Pacific, which includes Australia, Japan, and China, Evernote has over 15 million users and is growing at 225 percent in the region in the past year.

In China, Evernote operates as a standalone service with a different name (Yinxiang Biji), a local team, and new data centers. It is, however, not the dominant cloud note service in China, with local competitors like Netease and Shanda all trying to grab a piece of that market.

Fyi, Tiang Lim is the only Evernote person in Southeast Asia so far.

HotelQuickly is a mobile-only service that helps users book hotels really quickly. It’s available in six countries: Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. It provides four to six hotels for fast picking and booking. These three stars or above hotels are handpicked by the team with up to a 70 percent discount in pricing. HotelQuickly is available both on iOS and Android.

HotelQuickly was founded by five co-founders: Tomas Laboutka (CEO), Christian Mischler (COO), Michal Juhas (CTO), Mario Peng (CFO), Raphael Cohen (CSO). Interestingly, both Christian and Raphael are actually ex-Rocket Internet Asia members. Christian is the former COO of FoodPanda while Raphael was the Managing Director of FoodPanda Vietnam and DropGifts Singapore.

HotelQuickly was officially launched at WebMob’s Thailand Meetup yesterday in Bangkok. From my understanding, it has also raised $500,000 from a group of undisclosed European and Asian angel investors.

What inspired the founders to start HotelQuickly was simple. CEO Tomas Laboutka said that it was a pain to book hotels quickly while on the go, saying “The big boys realized there’s a problem but they are stuck in their old system.”

The startup now has hired 24 people across Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Interestingly, 34 percent of the team are ex-Rocket Internet folks. Four out of five of HotelQuickly’s founders are based in Bangkok, Thailand.

Laboutka said that there are many reasons why Bangkok is a great place to build a company. He feels the startup community is quickly building up with the help of Hubba and Launchpad, which has attracted more attention from investors. People in Thailand are also eager to work and are great designers, though he lamented that there aren’t enough tech-capable graduates for hire. Last but not least definitely, comparing to Singapore, Bangkok is surely a more affordable place to bootstrap.

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.

There has been a lot of talk about Japan’s price comparison giant Kakaku coming south to Southeast Asia. Now it finally has, launching its new service Priceprice in Philippines, Thailand, and most recently in Indonesia.

The good folks at Webgeek actually wrote about Priceprice two months ago, reporting that as of November 2012, Kakaku has about 997 million users. That figure probably makes Kakaku the largest price comparison site in Asia based on user count. Other local price comparison sites in Southeast Asia include Priceza (Thailand), Telunjuk (Indonesia), PriceArea (Indonesia), and also Rocket Internet’s PricePanda (Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia).

Price comparison sites in Southeast Asia are still in a nascent stage and could be way more popular. So the winner of the Southeast Asia price comparison market is really still up for grabs. Though Kakaku’s Priceprice and Rocket’s PricePanda certainly have more cash to make more mistakes, Priceza, PriceArea, and Telunjuk have the local insights and are probably agile enough to make this a mouth-watering battle.

And the aforementioned price comparison sites probably aren’t the only ones fighting to plant their flags in Southeast Asian countries. My guess is that Alibaba Group’s eTao, a price comparison site for China, is probably watching and studying how to best enter Southeast Asia. eTao certainly has the budget to fight things out or maybe even buy one or two of the local sites to get things started in this region.

Thai co-working space Pun Space has opened its doors to the public yesterday. The office is located in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, and co-founder Vichaya Piqué Sirisanthana hopes that they can attract entrepreneurial talent to their office:

Chiang Mai is a nice and quiet, mid-sized town that many software developers and creative designers love. Most of them, however, are working in coffee shops or from home. We’re not sure what’s the demand will be like, but we’d love to give it a try.

Pun Space (meaning “shared space”) is open everyday from 9am to 9pm. There are 34 hot-seats, an eight-seat meeting room equipped with webcams for video conferencing, as well as a big-screen TV, and facilities like a printer, scanner, copier, and phones. But startups usually work long hours, and to accommodate that, Piqué is now considering 24-hour access by setting up a key card access system for the resident members.

To work at Pun Space for a day normally costs 199 baht (US$6.67), or the price drops for longer memberships. The daily member rate is almost twice that of the price of a Starbucks coffee in the country, so why should people consider making use of a co-working space? Piqué explains that there are a lot of benefits, such as being able to do longer working hours than in a cafe, having the chance to meet people with the same interests, and creating a nice separation between personal life and work compared to working from home.

You can try working at Pun Space for free in March. The website is now up, showing further details and a regular price list here. Last month we dropped into another working space in Thailand, down in Bangkok, called Hubba Space which is also a partner with Pun Space.

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

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

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

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

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

Click to enlarge the map.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

Hey folks! Our Tech in Asia Meetup events are rolling along, and next we are heading to the capital of the land of smiles – Bangkok. For those of you who are interested to connect and learn more about the startup space in Thailand, this is the right event for you.

We have invited Tiang Lim Foo, who drives market development at Evernote, where he focuses in developing new markets in APAC through partnerships and localized marketing initiatives. We will be having a coffee chat session with him, touching on the startup lessons he learned during his time at Evernote. Tiang Lim will also be sharing more about Evernote’s development in Southeast Asia.

Besides our coffee chat session with Tiang Lim, we are also looking for startups who are interested to pitch at this Meetup! If you have the guts to pitch in front of about 100 people, send me a note. We have slots for about three to five startups to pitch. In your email, kindly send me your brief pitch to andrew[at]techinasia.com in this format:

• Name of applicant
• Position
• Name of startup
• Website
• Email
• Contact number
• One sentence pitch, such as: “My company, (insert name of company), is developing (a defined offering) to help (a defined audience) (solve a problem) with (secret sauce)”.

Meetup tickets are always free and they run out fast, so grab your tickets now. See you in Bangkok on March 21st, Thursday, at 6:15 p.m. More details below.

Agenda:

• Registration: 6.15 – 7.00pm
• [Discussion] Startup Lessons from Evernote: 7.00 – 8.00pm
• Networking & Dinner: 8.00 – 9.00pm

Venue:

Launchpad @ Sethiwan Tower

139 Thanon Pan, Bang Rak, Bangkok, Thailand 10500

About our speaker: Tiang Lim Foo

Based in Singapore, Tiang Lim drives Market Development at Evernote, where he focuses in developing new markets in APAC through partnerships and localized marketing initiatives.

Previously, the VP of Product of a SingTel Innov8 funded start-up focused on mobile development, content distribution and app monetization. He is responsible for identifying key publishing & payment partners to value add the MoVend commerce platform. He was also responsible for developer relations, feature planning & product marketing.

A Mechanical Engineering graduate from the National University of Singapore, Tiang Lim also spent a year at Silicon Valley studying at Stanford’s MS&E department and consulting for start-ups in the consumer web space and medical device industries.

Thank you to our Awesome Sponsors:

Corporate sponsors

VC sponsors

Startup sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

Thai tech blog Thumbsup wrapped up its third ever Start it Up, Power it Up earlier this month. Over 200 participants listened to points of view and advice from guest speakers from all over the continent. After all that, there was a pitching contest that saw one winner and two runners up emerge.

The guest speakers came from Thailand in the form of the Venture Catalyst group and Gravity Innovation; while from Japan, Indonesia, and Singapore came GREE Ventures, Weglo, Silicon Straits, and Nulab.

The event emphasized product development for startups, starting from creative thinking and how to build an innovative startup company, right up to the importance of UX/UI. Also on the agenda was how to do marketing on a regional scale, and using cloud-powered back-ends like Microsoft Azure. There were discussions about the Southeast Asia startup ecosystem, some insights about raising funds, and also contributions on the subject of IT trends by a representative of Dell.

Winners and runners-up

The final session of the day was of course the startup pitching competition:

The minimalist Privepass homepage. Click to enlarge.

Privepass -

The members-only travel booking site emerged as the winner at this event. It offers exciting getaways around the world and focuses on tailor-made trips for the experience of a lifetime. The Start it Up, Power it Up judges were also impressed with Privepass’ engaging, socially-connected editorial content.

NoonSwoon -

NoonSwoon was one of two runners up. The startup introduces singles to a quality match every day at noon (hence the name), usually to someone with whom they have a mutual Facebook friend. Users have 24 hours to determine whether or not they like the person they’re matched with. If both matches like each other, they are able to chat directly through the NoonSwoon app without needing to reveal private contact information. This is one in a wave of Facebook-connected dating services this year, such as Bang With Friends and PairBuddy.

Symbols Of Style -

Also known as ‘SOS’, this is an online magazine and shop specializing in all kinds of trendy things. All the products it features are specially selected by SOS’s team of stylists and cater to people with an eye for quality, design, and style. Categories that SOS covers include: men’s and women’s clothing, gadgets, design, home furnishings, travel, and dining. The site uses regularly updated editorial content to help users decide what are the coolest items to buy.

That’s a wrap for this Bangkok-based event ¹ – look out for Start it Up, Power it Up #4 in the near future.

Thailand’s mobile commerce startup ShopSpot has raised S$779,000 (US$630,000) from Jungle Ventures (with Singapore government money) and SingTel Innov8. Following a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) model, ShopSpot works like Alibaba’s Taobao does in China, but this startup is very much a mobile-first type of company.

With the funding announcement, ShopSpot co-founder and CEO Natsakon Kiatsuranon says that the app also took “a pivot”. What exactly, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get an answer from Kiatsuranon in time for his 9.00am embargoed release. Anyhow, I gave the app a try and it works pretty well. It is as simple as it can get. For shoppers: Tap, swipe, view, and buy. For seller: Snap, add info, and sell.

I also like that the app makes it very simple to communicate directly with the seller. On mobile it makes it even more natural to chat. Sad thing is, no sellers have time to talk to me when I ask them for discounts (see image). ShopSpot also allows shoppers to view items based on location, another feature which enhances ShopSpot’s mobile-first approach. The nearer the item is to you, the more convenient it is to pick up from the seller, and the more likely that he or she will buy. Most sellers are either from Thailand or Singapore right now.

I don’t see any business model executed on the service yet. Anyway, it would be silly trying to monetize the app now. Asian users, in general, will run away if they know they’re being charged. Over in China, Alibaba’s Jack Ma held off from charging Taobao sellers for as long as possible in its early days. Ma’s intention was to gain as many users as possible.

ShopSpot and perhaps other C2C marketplaces like Tokopedia are following the same path. Only question is, can ShopSpot keep growing and raising money to the point when it can finally monetize and be self-sustainable. Taobao’s story is a one-off and I would credit Ma’s genius and also China’s massive, and to a large extent, homogenous market. It would be interesting to see how local C2C players tackle the uber-fragmented Southeast Asian market. Definitely tough, but certainly not impossible, and mobile commerce with big pictures and not much text might be the answer.

ShopSpot was a proud graduate of JFDI Asia and also previously raised a seed round prior to today’s funding.

I’ve sent several questions to Kiatsuranon and will update as soon as I hear back.

• 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.

Thai startup The VCgroup – which stands for Venture Catalyst – has launched an interesting new cloud client platform called Penta. Aiming to make a new cloud platform for Smart TVs, VoiP, healthcare solutions, and lots more, the young company partnered up with Hong Kong’s Power-All Networks and Foxconn (the well known gadget OEM) to launch a joint-venture last year called Power-All Venture. And this is where the new Penta comes in.

Clients can take up the SaaS and its Pentabox hardware (pictured) as part of their own branded solutions. Aside from the above examples, startups or major corporations could make use of it to power advert screens, home automation for lights or electronics, web TV, video-on-demand, and video conferencing. Penta’s framework is based on Android and Linux, allowing clients to run existing Android apps or develop their own on a familiar platform.

VCgroup founder Dr. Jay Jootar (in the suit) and team visit Foxconn.

The Penta service is open and can be used with any third-party app engine or cloud provider like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, or deployed via a business’ own servers. It’s good to see a Thailand-based startup thinking globally with this kind of well-connected, high potential web platform.

You can connect with chairman and founder Dr. Jay Jootar (pictured) and the crew on the VCgroup’s Facebook page.

Privepass is a members-only travel site that provides its users exclusive travel experiences. The concept is somewhat similar to ImpulseFlyer and Luxe Nomad. But its founder Vitaya Arunanondchai, an alumni of Stanford Graduate School of Business, points out a few key ways in which it differs:

While ImpulseFyer and LuxeNomad focus on flash deals of luxury hotels, they only focus on the room rates. Privepass.com has a focus on the experience and the lifestyle of its members. Our products are lifestyle packages which includes not just accommodations but also other services such as dining, activities, spa, or extra privileges such as free upgrades or discounts when using hotel facilities.

Arunanondchai adds that his startup, though based in Thailand, also offers travel packages and experiences for things like partying in Shanghai, shopping in Tokyo, and even attending fashion shows in Milan with an exclusive dinner with Giorgio Armani.

Privepass was founded last year and so far has 40,000 members and is working with 150 hotels and lifestyle providers. Arunanondchai self-funded the startup which, according to Crunchbase, amounts to $170,000. Some readers may recall that Arunanondchai is one of the eight partners at M8VC, a local VC launched recently in Thailand.

This is where you work!

Local Thai venture capital cum incubator M8VC is accepting applications for its accelerator program starting today. The deadline is Valentine’s Day, February 14.

For entrepreneurs, the benefits of the program are listed below:

• Seed funding from 200,000THB to 700,000THB (about US$6,700 – $23,400)
• Office space at Launchpad for at least four months. Located at Bangkok, Thailand.
• Coaching from the mentors at M8VC, including Pawoot Pongvitayapanu who founded Tarad.com (he is speaking at Startup Asia Singapore this coming April!)
• Business connections from M8VC crew

Hungry tech entrepreneurs can apply here. If you want to find out more about M8VC, I urge you to read Thumbsup’s interview with them here.

Bangkok’s first co-working space, Hubba, is popular among Thai entrepreneurs and freelancers. Located in the very happening Ekkamai area, Hubba is 300 square meters in area and can fit up to 70 people simultaneously. The co-working space now has 60 active members and co-founders Amarit Charoenphan and Charle Charoenphan expect to hit 150 members by March. Some of the startups housed at Hubba include Creativemove, Infinit Closet, Computerlogy, and Pheromone Studio.

The walk from Ekkamai station to Hubba feels a little long, especially under the hot sun. But all is forgotten when you arrive at the homely ground of Hubba. It even feels a bit like a house, which makes it cozy to work in.

Hubba doesn’t just stop at Bangkok, and will soon be expanding to Chiang Mai. Amarit told me:

We are expanding to Chiang Mai via our partnership with Pun Space due to our belief in the potential of the city, given the large amount of talented graduates in programming, large expat freelance community setting up tech and web companies. We plan to expand to four spaces in 2013.

Besides running the co-working space, Amarit and Charle also act as event organizers, helping organizations such as Thumbsup and e27 to run events locally in Thailand. The duo also run events like Startup Weekend, Startup Outing, and Jellyweek 2013, which is happening this week.

So if you’re in Bangkok and looking for a cozy space to work, head over to Hubba:

Address:
19 Soi Ekkamai 4, Sukumvit 63 Rd.
Prakanong Nua, Wattana
Bangkok, Thailand 10110

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been five months since we reported on Thailand’s online restaurant review site and mobile app service Wongnai.com (translated literally as ‘Insider’) , and during our trip to Thailand, we had the chance to meet the CEO and co-founder, Yod Chinsupakul.

Based on the statistics he has provided, it seems that Wongnai.com has enjoyed significant growth over the past few months. In August 2012, their community had 200,000 registered users and it has since jumped up to 360,000 users, out of which one third are monthly active users. Chinsupakul also added that the number of community restaurant reviews stand between 50,000 to 60,000 and that in terms of restaurant reviews and listings, Wongnai.com has the best metrics compared to other competitors based in Thailand, which are mostly portals that also have other features such as travel and lifestyle in additon to the food features.

Wongnai.com has also recently partnered with Nostra Maps to populate Nostra’s restaurant listings in the Wongnai database. Prior to this partnership, Wongnai had only 25,000 restaurant listings and now that has more than tripled to 110,000.

Wongnai is tailored specifically for Thai locals, with the bulk of users in Bangkok and the next being Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, which explains the company’s upcoming plan to open a new office there.

Currently, the startup is working closely with AIS (a telecommunications company in Thailand) so that their next mobile app version can provide information on restaurant discounts. They will also be introducing a new check-in feature for users. Presently, Wongnai is available for free on the iOS and Android platforms. But it will soon be launching its apps on the Blackberry 10 and Windows 8 platform, hoping to be one of the first in the Thai market to launch apps on these new platforms.

Exteen is Thailand’s most popular content management system (CMS) for bloggers; it’s like the WordPress of Thailand. Or at least that is what founders Patinya Sangiamchit and Teepagorn Wuttipitayamongkol claim. The growth of the company really has been quite impressive though. Today, Exteen generates 30 million monthly pageviews with over 600,000 registered bloggers. Over 100,000 bloggers are still actively blogging today and the number continues to grow.

Exteen was incidentally founded in 2004 when Sangiamchit and Wuttipitayamongkol were still college students. Sangiamchit wanted to build a CMS for his friends who love blogging, but met with some technical problems which Wuttipitayamongkol came in to crack. Three days later, the problems were solved and the first version of Exteen was born.

Sangiamchit and Wuttipitayamongkol are geeks and didn’t know much about business or how to market a product. Thankfully, back then, there wasn’t any CMS in the Thai language. Exteen was among the first CMSs tailored-made and localized for Thai bloggers; word spread and user registration shot up. By the end of 2004, Exteen has registered over 1,000 active bloggers despite the founders running the site part-time.

The young entrepreneurs graduated from Kasetsart University in 2006 and started corporate life while working on Exteen after work hours. By 2007, Sangiamchit and Wuttipitayamongkol recalled that Exteen had 50,000 active bloggers generating over 10 million monthly pageviews. Through online advertising, Exteen could bring in more than $30,000 revenue a year which is more than both of their combined salary and the company was profitable. Seeing the opportunity, Sangiamchit and Wuttipitayamongkol quit their jobs to run Exteen full-time.

Just last year, Exteen concluded its first financing round with an undisclosed “international ad network company.” With investment coming in, Exteen expanded its team to eight people. With 30 million pageviews a month, Exteen today generates more than $150,000 in revenue and remains profitable.

Sangiamchit and Wuttipitayamongkol are eyeing expansion to other parts of Southeast Asia but couldn’t share concrete plans with me yet. When asked about the most difficult challenges they faced over the course of eight years running the startup, the duo said that they wish Thailand’s internet laws would protect platforms more. They explained:

An inappropriate comment or blog post written by users on Exteen could get us into legal troubles. But thankfully, there isn’t any damage done so far.

In case you’re curious how the name Exteen comes about, it basically means Extraordinary Teenagers. And perhaps it’s apt to say that the founders have been equally extraordinary to have successfully operated the company for eight years and running.

Launchpad’s colorful work space makes everyone happy.

Maybe I haven’t been to too many co-working spaces, but Launchpad in Bangkok is kind of impressive. I haven’t seen any co-working spaces of such a size in Southeast Asia before. The closest one that comes to my mind is Innovation Works in Beijing.

Launchpad has a total of two levels of co-working space, amounting to 880 square meters that can easily hold 140 people. Within the space, it has three meeting rooms, a game room, a presentation hall (good for press conferences or events), and a silent room. Just outside the main co-working space, there’s a cafe for caffeine-craving entrepreneurs to keep them awake. Individual patrons can pay 220 baht (US$7) to work at Launchpad for a day or they can cough up 6,000 baht (US$197) for a month. There will also occasionally be events held at Launchpad.

The space is run by Vincent Sethiwan, Sam Tiyavutiroj, and Siravut Tummavaranukup. Vincent tells me:

Offices don’t always have to be serious. Professional can be fun. Based on my working experience in Thailand, there’s no office space where you could play and work, a professional and fun concept. A mixture of people from different backgrounds and industries will make the workplace more creative. We believe this will help to kickstart the Thai startup ecosystem. […] The more investors, co-working spaces, and startups we have, the more it will benefit everyone in the ecosystem. Everyone wins.

Launchpad is located in the central business district of Bangkok which is a very convenient place for folks to work and meet. Six weeks after its launch, six startups, including Like.me, Anipipo, Just Snap, and Got it, all now call Launchpad home.

Coincidentally, Sam and Vincent are also part of M8VC, a venture capital fund focusing on Thai startups that launched last month as well. Under M8VC’s incubation program, the accepted startups will utilize Launchpad’s spaces. Launchpad is also a place for startups to gain visibility among local and international investors.

Having spent an afternoon at Launchpad, I can say that it’s a really neat place for entrepreneurs, freelancers, developers, and investors to hang out, work, or just chill. For now it is open from 9AM to 8PM on weekdays and until 6PM on weekends. Launchpad is scheduled to be open 24/7 from February onwards.

I chatted a lot with Sam and Vincent today. But Vincent said one thing in particular which especially stuck with me:

We are not going to wait for the [Thai startup] ecosystem. We’re going to build it.

The Launchpad cafe, located just outside the co-working space.

Some random (but helpful) drawings on the wall.

Work work.

Launchpad

Address: Sethiwan Tower – 139 Thanon Pan, Bangkok, Thailand 10500

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: 36kr - article in Chinese]

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

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

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

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

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

Thailand’s new M8VC fund has 300 million baht (nearly US$10 million) to invest in local startups next year, so it’ll be a new VC player to watch. Myself and the Thumbsup team had the chance to talk to M8VC’s Pornthep “Vincent” Sethiwan, who’s also the co-founder of Launch Pad, one of Thailand’s top co-working spaces.

Started just last week, M8VC is an incubator, accelerator, and technology investment firm with its headquarters and its incubation center in Bangkok.

Vincent started by saying, “Venture capital and angel investing are powerful forces for change. It allows individuals to pursue their dreams that improve society and makes the world a better place.” And so M8VC would like to contribute to the Thai startup community and be an agent of change. Vincent adds:

It is not easy for passionate entrepreneurs to thrive in the Southeast Asia [SEA] market. The way things are done in SEA is vastly different than in the West. Many talented young entrepreneurs do not have the needed experience or networks to take their venture to success. This is exactly where we come in to help.

M8VC HQ. Click to enlarge

Each founder of M8VC has previously started up ventures, and each has experienced successes and failures first-hand. We are confident in our ability to help lead our incubated portfolio companies to success.

Fellow founder Krisd Aksornwong tells us:

M8VC will assist from the start, analyzing each team’s idea and business plan continuously until the prototype is produced, and real products come to market. We share our vision in pitching or selling an idea, and create a financial structure to help mobilize big funds for expanding to markets abroad. We have experts from each field to look after every stage. Since your idea is the most essential aspect of your business, we at M8VC are doing our best to protect the owner of the idea without considering whether it will turn to mutual cooperation later, or not.

M8VC will focus on fairly small amounts of seed money, and startups under its wing can utilize M8VC’s networks both within Thailand and abroad – that includes entrepreneurs, financiers, and investors who all have, we’re told, a great track record of success.

The core M8VC team consists of Vincent and Krisd, plus Shakrit Chanrungsakul, Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, Kit Arunanondchai, Sua Kanjanasakchai, Varut Bulakul, and Permsiri Tiyavutiroj.

This is yet is another movement in the startup ecosystem in Thailand to keep your eyes on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One-click saving to Evernote in the updated Tencent ONE Browser for Android.

Unlike Tencent’s QQ browser, ONE Browser (formerly called Ibibo Browser in India, or as iBrowser elsewhere) compresses mobile data, and claims to be able to reduce users’ data costs by up to 85 percent. It competes with Opera Mini, which is arguably the most widely used mobile browser (also with data compression capabilities) in Indonesia, as well as UC Browser.

With 40 million users worldwide, including 200,000 users in Indonesia, Evernote seems to be placing a great deal of focus on Indonesia, a nation which matches up very well with Tencent’s mobile strategy. The Chinese company recently partnered with media conglomerate PT. Global Mediacom and also stated its ambitions quite clearly at our Startup Asia Jakarta conference in June of this year.

Andy Pan, Tencent’s Director of International Mobile Products, said:

We are rapidly introducing our products in the Asian region and Indonesia is a primary market for us. With the mobile phone subscribers’ base now topping more than 260 million, Indonesia’s mobile phone penetration has tripled in five years.

Evernote seems to be rapidly ramping up partnerships and initiatives across Asia in 2012. In May, it launched Yinxiang Biji, an Evernote service localized for the Chinese market which was then followed up by Alipay integration (to pay for Evernote pro services). In July, we noted that Evernote has 1.1 million users in China. Just recently, we wrote that Moleskin also creatively launched a smart (paper) notebook which enhances the quality of your photos taken with your mobile phone within the Evernote app.

Thanks to the folks over at Coconuts Bangkok for pointing out that the Tourism Authority of Thailand has launched an account on NHN Japan’s popular chat platform Line. Its goal is to create another channel by which it can update travelers about promotions and activities.

The governor of the TAT, Suraphon Svetasreni, noted that this effort is part of its worldwide social media strategy. It’s interesting to see that Line has risen rapidly to be counted alongside social networks like Facebook and Twitter as important channels through which to reach consumers.

You can find their account by going to the ‘add friend’ section of Line, and browsing ‘Official accounts.’ You can find Tourism Authority under the the ID ‘Amazing Thailand’ [1]. And from now until December 26 the TAT says it is offering fun stickers for download as well.

We also recently saw Thai foodstuff and retail giant CP Foods join Line as well, and local mobile operator AIS is working with Line as well. There is even a set of exclusive stickers available for the cartoon character Mamuang, from Thai cartoonist Wisut Ponnimit.

When last we checked, Line had a user base of about 75 million in total [2], with nearly half of those being based in Japan, and a high portion from other Asian countries.

Line has been in the top 10 social networking apps for Thailand on iOS for about a year now (currently sixth), and appears to be doing well on Google Play as well, ranked fifth overall for free apps in Thailand.

Just a few weeks after India’s MakeMyTrip (NASDAQ:MMYT) acquired the Thailand-based site HotelTravel for $25 million, the travel e-commerce site is continuing its Southeast Asia push by announcing today a new acquisition. This time, MakeMyTrip has acquired a majority stake in the Thai hotel aggregator ITC Group for $3.2 million.

ITC is a tour operator in Thailand which also runs a hotel reservations business. The deal gives MakeMyTrip a lot more offline connections on the ground in Thailand, and indicates – along with the HotelTravel buy-up – that Thailand is set to be a key outbound travel destination for India’s middle-class holiday-makers.

As an insightful guest post on our site explained earlier this year, MakeMyTrip has been leading the way in opening up affordable travel in India – especially by riding the wave of budget airlines. And so Thailand is a perfect fit for these leisurely, low-price get-aways.

[Source: VCcircle]

According to GFK Asia, the markets for laptops and tablets in Southeast Asian regions is seeing a surge in demand and growth. Its figures for the first three quarters of 2012 say that across the key markets of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore, nearly 8.8 million laptops and tablets were sold, which was up 26 percent on the same period the year before.

That accounts for a total dollar spend of $4.72 billion, which is up 12 percent on the previous year. GFK Asia’s account director for digital technology, Gerard Tan, further explains:

Our findings show that Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are the three biggest markets for such gadgets and collectively consume over 70 percent of the region’s sales volume while contributing 67 percent to the overall dollar value.

Given that many Southeast markets are still in early stages of development – especially when it comes to internet adoption – there’s certainly still enormous room for growth in Indonesia in particular. Likewise with more people coming online in Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam in the coming years, those markets will be key as well.

[Data from Internet World Stats]

The top 3 teams at the recent Startup Weekend Bangkok.

Startup Weekend Bangkok went off smoothly earlier this month at the Hubba Thailand co-working space. As is the regular format, entrepreneurs have 54 hours to convert ideas into conceptual products. The final session saw 10 teams pitching and ultimately there were three winners. First place went to Infinit Closet, whom we talked to after the event.

Here are the top three at the event:

3rd place: Toilet Now helps you find the best toilet nearby.

2nd: Fluffi is a social network for pet lovers.

1st: Infinit Closet is a fashion-oriented social service for borrowing and lending clothes.

Maprang (2nd from left) and the Infinit Closet team. Click to enlarge.

We like the sound of the winning concept, and so our Thumbsup crew went to talk to one of the founders, Wichaya Sirasupparoekchai (Maprang), a woman who’s clearly got a feel for fashion. She explains that the rest of the team is made up of men: Chayanin Sripob (Poon), Pongpeera Chawalathawat (Art), and Songphon Buasathit (Tul).

First up, how do you feel as the prize winner?

Maprang: Everybody is very glad and proud of it. We utilized and adapted all the knowledge we learned, and all the experience we’ve ever faced. The most important thing we’ve learned from this event is teamwork, especially working within such a limited time like this. It needs a good working plan, and responsibilities being assigned with mutual trust by team members; because each one has his/her own different strengths and weaknesses.

Tell us about Infinit Closet.

Maprang: Infinit Closet is an online service, as a website and a mobile app, for users – particularly the ladies – to share their closets (clothing) with friends. This idea came from the very common problem for ladies who never feel satisfied with their own apparel, and prefer wearing something new all the time. But, at the same time, they do not wish to pay more to buy more. Therefore, they turn to borrow some clothes from their close friends instead. Infinit Closet jumps in to assist such borrowings among extended groups of women, and to make it easier.

What do you think convinced the Startup Weekend Bangkok judges?

Maprang: I think there might be three factors: The concept is clear with solutions to the targets; the business model is feasible; and our pitch was easily understood.

What’s next for your project?

Maprang: During this Startup Weekend event we had also tested this idea with several female friends, most of whom have shown interest – and now we are even more confident after winning the prize. For our next steps we will continue our marketing plan and refine the app technology because we feel there are still several things that need to be crystallized before taking any further action. There might be some additional features to fill the gaps that were kindly pointed out by the [judging] committee. We’re making progress right away, so please keep following!

The Infinit Closet team continues to participate in the Global Startup Battle too, so they’re going to be busy in the months ahead.

[Top photo from Hubba Thailand]

Note: This article is a translation of one by the same author on Thumbsup.

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

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

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

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

[Source: TechCrunch]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

China’s biggest web company, Tencent (HKG:0700), has been pushing its cross-platform browser for mobiles, QQ Browser, around the world for quite some time. And now we have some updated stats from Tencent about the app’s progress so far. QQ Browser, across its five versions (for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Symbian, and Java), has 16 million users around the world – outside of China – right now. 90 percent of those are based in Asia.

Aside from those in China, Tencent tells us that the top 10 nations for QQ Browser usage are, starting with the largest: India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Brazil, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

Eyes on Indonesia

With most of those QQ Browser users being in this region, Tencent is also focusing its marketing in Asia, touting features such as strong Evernote integration, a wide choice of preset search engines, and features like ‘night mode’. China’s biggest social and gaming company has, however, singled out one Southeast Asian nation. A Tencent representative explains:

Indonesia is one of the most important for marketing QQ Browser. QQ Browser already gained over two million Indonesian users since it launched in Indonesia last year.

Tencent is eyeing Indonesia’s very young and mobile-loving populace with a couple of other products too: its WeChat messaging app, and the flirtatious Qute.

Tencent says that “Android will be the key platform, but others will also be important” for QQ Browser going forward. That’s a testament to the power of Google’s mobile OS to pull in both high-end smartphone users and new feature phone converts – or Blackberry escapees.

To push QQ Browser in the region, the company is not just relying on the main app stores, but is also partnering up with the likes of Getjar and Mobango.

Tencent is also hoping for a global success with its WeChat app, which has a fast-growing ratio of international users.

But there are plenty of other browsers to choose from in this crowded market, such as the China-made UC Browser, which has more global users – an impressive 40+ million – thus far.

To give it a try, pick your OS of choice on the QQ Browser homepage.

Disclosure: Tencent is an occasional advertiser on the site. Read more on our ethics page.

China’s top search engine, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), is pushing into the Thailand web market even more today with a major new version of one of its Windows PC apps. Called Baidu PC Faster (see it here), it’s designed to keep users’ computers feeling fresh and speedy and has just been bumped up to v2.0.

The Baidu PC Faster app launched in June of this year in beta form, and the company says it has had one million downloads already. The v2.0 bump brings it out of beta and adds things like USB Guard for full scanning of thumb drives, and full Thai language support in the app.

It’s not Baidu’s first product in Thailand, as it has also released an antivirus app for Thai netizens. Indeed, Baidu says that Thailand – with its 25 million web users – is its first overseas markets for these free antivirus apps. But this is about more than just an app, as the Beijing-based firm is clearly making a slow-but-steady expansion in the Southeast Asia region – starting initially with Thailand and Vietnam. A Baidu representative has confirmed with us that the company has small offices in both Thailand and Vietnam, with a mix of local and Chinese staff, but they’re not yet at the level of being major overseas branch offices.

In an announcement today, Baidu spokesperson Kaiser Kuo said:

Baidu wants to do its part to contribute to the healthy development of the online environment in Thailand, and we believe that offering a simple, safe, powerful and free solution to protect Internet users and enhance their online experience is one of the most important contributions we can make.

Earlier this summer, Baidu and a Singaporean firm opened a joint research lab in the city-state, the Baidu-I2R Research Centre (BIRC), for natural language processing technology. That will focus on the Thai and Vietnamese languages, and perhaps suggests the inevitable launch of Baidu’s search engine in the countries as a direct challenge to Google.

In both those countries, Baidu has launched a handful of PC apps, and also some web products, such as localized versions of its Hao123 links portal, and its Wikipedia-esque Baidu ZhiDao (the Thai site is pictured below). But Baidu has met with resistance in Vietnam, mainly on nationalistic rivalries over disputed islands that are claimed by both Vietnam and China. Its reception in Thailand seems to be a lot less frosty so far.

Baidu's Wikipedia-like site, ZhiDao, in Thai. Click to enlarge.

We are back with a new issue of our Thai tech round-up, courtesy of Thumbsup. This one focuses on startup fundraising, and a fresh, new look for a Thai community website.

Intouch backs Ookbee

At the end of last month, the Shin Corporation’s Intouch announced it has taken a 25 percent stake in Ookbee, a digital publisher and major e-bookstore, with its $2 million investment in it.

The massive Shin Corp did not invest so much in any outside business for a decade, so it’s a major vote of confidence in the popular e-bookstore. The funding comes via Shin Corp’s Invent investment arm.

Ookbee has grown itself with partnerships with major telcos and retailers, creating apps and services such as the AIS bookstore, and the B2S app. This fund raising will enable Ookbee to grow faster and expand in the region.

Launching today, the new-look Pantip 3G

We reported recently that the popular Thai forums Pantip 3G will see a major website revamp coming soon – and it launches today. Invited guests are gathering right now at Central World to hear of more new features that will come with this relaunch. Take a look at it here.

Food giant CP launches free stickers in Line app

The Thai foodstuffs and retail giant CP Foods is getting more social by jumping on the bandwagon of brands using the Line messaging app for social marketing. Special CP stickers (pictured above) launched in Line’s sticker store on October 9th and are free to download and use in the app.

Skan Srisuwan and Kan Supabanpot

With clients such as Square Enix, Lucas Arts, Namco Bandai, Top Cow, and Stan Lee’s POW Entertainment, Studio HIVE is Thailand’s number one art outsourcing studio for concept art, comic book illustrations, and images for various branches of entertainment. Close to celebrating the company’s second year of existence, founders Skan Srisuwan and Kan Supabanpot have gathered an impressive track record of clients. Their next goal is to do the same with videogames with their first big game project being based on the well-known Ong Bak movie license.

Busy bees in Bangkok

Srisuwan and Supabanpot have been best friends for years and have always shared a passion for games and the industry that creates them. “We always knew we’d end up working together to create something beautiful,” Supabanpot admits. Before the dynamic duo founded Studio HIVE, Srisuwan was still working at another art studio, where he developed illustrations and designed for Square Enix’s game Front Mission Evolved. Supabanpot was busy founding the ThaiGamerNetwork to work with and support foreign game publishers and distributors in their efforts to promote video games in Thailand, and (because of the heavy piracy rates) stimulated the purchase of legal game copies.

When Srisuwan’s previous job encountered some changes, the event signaled the duo to start working together. They set up the company in 2010 and left for the Tokyo Game Show a couple of months later to talk to some of the biggest names in the game industry. Carrying a thesis project of some game design students that they had just hired, the duo bumped into the likes of gaming legend Hideo Kojima. Supabanpot notes:

We purposefully didn’t talk too much business with them, admits. But the Tokyo Game Show proved to us that meeting these high profile people isn’t that hard at all.

Thanks to the thesis project that the young group of developers had made before being hired by Studio HIVE, Srisuwan and Supabanpot were able to acquire a deal to develop the video game for the next installment of Ong Bak movie franchise, which is planned to be released sometime in 2013. At that time, Studio HIVE’s own art team was also hard at work to finish a new project for a graphic novel called Romeo & Juliet: The War from 1821 Comics and Marvel legend Stan Lee.

Supabanpot explains:

Our livelihood as the supplier of quality artwork and illustrations is providing us with a very profitable and stable source of revenue. That income isn’t wasted and is directly put back into our company in order to move forward and adapt.

Those revenue streams are also currently financing the finalization of their Ong Bak project, which a team of more than ten has been working on tirelessly since October of last year. The game is already in its final phase of being extensively polished.

with Stan Lee

A different approach

With a hefty amount of experience with only international clients, both gentlemen frown upon the traditional Thai business culture they’ve left behind. Supabanpot adds:

Our internationally oriented attitude is what makes us the best in Thailand and allows us to stand out. Our end goal is to slowly decrease our artistic efforts and shift towards game development in the near future. We never had a doubt about the direction we wanted to take.

Finding the right staff to set out into that new direction is hard with such an attitude. Under Srisuwan’s creative direction, the team at Studio HIVE now consists of some of the most elite artists in the country.

People who come to work with us start feeling the pressure to perform by themselves. They mostly create that pressure themselves, which causes some people to leave the studio on their own when they discovered they weren’t up to their tasks.

To earn a spot in Studio HIVE’s team doesn’t just require you to be a top notch artist, but also to have the passion for entertainment and to be able to not take yourself too seriously. “We strive to sustain a company culture that is focused on comradery and friendship,” Supabanpot adds. “If you don’t fit in there, you’re free to go.”

Now that Studio Hive’s reputation is growing and gaining more ground doing concept art for more game developers, including for mobile games, the stream of job applications from game professionals has also started pouring in:

That’s why our plan is to start focusing more on young game developers. We will select the most talented ones and also offer them various ways of further education under the studio’s care.

Doing what you love most

The confident attitude of Studio HIVE not only translates into a straight forward attitude, but also a spotless reputation and a collection of A-list clients. A quick overview of the studio’s portfolio makes it hard to question the capacities of creative director Srisuwan and his dedicated team of artists. But what’s the secret behind their success? According to Supabanpot:

“We only work on what we want. We don’t work on games for kids or casual games to rake in the money. We’re not big fans of how people try to make money by using games as advertising or educational tools. We choose our own projects based on how cool they are. After all, we’re running a young company and only want to create cool things. Working on well-paid, but especially very cool projects with clients such as Lucas Arts and Square Enix also makes our team incredibly happy and proud of their work.

Getting those high-profile gigs is also partially thanks to Studio HIVE’s own agent in the United States who, for a commission, helps the studio get connected with these big shots. It’s a pretty good deal for a young studio such as Studio HIVE. But with their reputation on the rise, the studio receives an increasing amount of these assignments.

As their art team is now very stable, most of the studios attention is focused on their Ong Bak game.

Dealing with the business side of things and the game being based on an existing well-known IP has proven to be much more difficult for us than I initially thought. We are very lucky that Ong Bak’s production company Sahamongkol Film international is very supportive. The most fun part for us was when we figured out the main concept of the
game from the treatment we received from Sahamongkol. We had to make sure the game would get along with their treatment, but we actually received a lot of creative freedom and space to come up with various of elements in this game by ourselves.

The success of the Ong Bak game will definitely be a determining factor in Studio Hive’s future as a game development studio, making it not only an ambitious first project for the young studio, but a relatively risky one.

We obviously have the goal to develop our own franchises one day, like we have always wanted. But are we ready for that yet? I’m not so sure about that.

Studio Hive’s work on the Ong Bak game will shed more light on that soon. The game itself has still not been revealed to the public and no information has been disclosed. It shouldn’t be a surprise to know that a well-defined art style and state-of-the-art visuals were one of the first elements in the game to be finished.

What we can share is that the Ong Bak game is full of detailed characters, lively and brightly colored environments and filled with influences from Thai culture and mythology. Studio HIVE is currently in the process of finishing the final touches on the project, but no details are yet available about when the game will be publicly presented or officially released.

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

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

1. Philippines

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

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

2. Indonesia

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

3. Malaysia

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

4. Thailand

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

5. South Korea

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

6. Singapore

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

Bonus

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

[Image source: HollywoodReporter.com]