Lots of Buttons wins Startup Asia Arena battle and USD10K; plus a roundup of all 20 companies

Lots of Buttons has won the Startup Asia Arena battle this year, winning USD 10,000 in cash. The startup operates a button store that helps crafters and manufacturers find what they need with the ease and convenience of online shopping and prices typically 50% below convention.

Startup Asia is a tech startup conference held at Biopolis in Singapore, which together with Echelon are the biggest ones in the country.

The 2012 winner was Teamie, a student collaboration platform.

Twenty startups from 9 countries were picked from over 300 submissions. Here’s a roundup of the 20:

Malaysia

Netizen Testing: the company is developing an online usability test tool powered by crowdsourcing to help startups and online businesses find out where users are confused and why they are leaving the target website. The results allow clients to fix their usability issues and increase their conversion rates. The service already has a number of users, including social networking site Friendster and news site Malaysiakini. Founder: Alvin Chai.

RichMediaAds.com: the company has built an online tool to create interactive rich media display ads for budget advertisers and small publishers to increase the quality of their ad campaigns. In place of banner ads, users can create websites-within-websites to increase user engagement. It already has funding, partnerships, and paying customers, but does not yet have data comparing animated banner ads with its product. CEO: Alvin Koay. Check out SGE’s coverage of RichMediaAds.

Hong Kong

Mmixr: a cloud-based, all-in-one presentation management tool to help companies to create, manage and share animated and branded presentations. It wants to be the iTunes for slides and presentations, where users can purchase stock images directly from within the app and use it for their slides. It’s working on a freemium model. Managing Director: David Francois.

Lots of Buttons: a button store that helps crafters and manufacturers find what they need with the ease and convenience of online shopping and prices typically 50% below convention. Buttons have high margin, small form factor making them cheap to ship, and inaccessible to crafters at the moment.

Lots of Buttons aims to be the world’s largest online crafts store, and is expanding to bigger verticals like beads and ribbons pending profitability (within 2 months) or angel investment. Its March sales are USD 13k, with an average order size of USD 25 but a customer acquisition cost of USD 10. Through its network of suppliers in China, it is able to ship buttons to customers without holding inventory, acheiving gross margins of 70 percent.

Singapore

DodoHub: a website to helps people build good habits through progress visualization and community support. It plans to monetize using a freemium model. It’s similar to United States’ Lift. Founder and developer: Hu Chen.