The Top 10 startups of Asia at Open Web Asia 2012

The light tropical resort island of Hainan, China turned into a business and tech hub for four days for the APEC SME Summit and Open Web Asia 2012. Held from Dec 7-10th December, the Summit is the premier forum for facilitating economic growth, cooperation, trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region. This year is the first time Open Web Asia (OWA) was held as part of the APEC SME Summit.

Held in both English and Mandarin, OWA this year saw several interesting panel discussions around mobile (read what went on in the panel I moderated on “The Golden Age of Asian Mobile Internet” (article in Mandarin), gaming and e-commerce. We even had a massive 10-member panel discussion on the various country startup ecosystems (article in Mandarin) around Asia.

Having been held once every two years since 2008 (first in Seoul, South Korea, then Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), it was the first time China hosted OWA. It was also the first time that OWA had a top ten startups award.

We scoured the entire Asia region to find these startups, with the help of key people like Lu Gang of TechNode (the main organizer of the conference), James Jung of beSUCCESS, Daniel Cerventus of Entrepreneurs.my, Rama Mamuaya of DailySocial.net, Casey Lau of StartupsHK, Ngân Sâu of Action.vn, Masaru Ikeda of StartupDating, Mohan Belani of e27, Gaurav Mishra, and myself.

From a huge list of 100, we narrowed it down to 20, and from these 20, 10 were chosen. They were chosen based on potential, traction, taking into account product and business models. To have qualified, the startup or one of its core features must have launched or released no more than a year ago.

So, without further ado, here are the top 10 startups of Asia at Open Web Asia 2012:

Between

Between (South Korea): Private social network for two people. It has almost 2 million downloads.

Burpple

Burpple (Singapore): Food journaling app. Burpple just raised a seed round of USD 500K.

Divide

Divide (Hong Kong): The Divide platform by Enterproid gives mobile professionals a new way to use their smartphones for both work and personal life.