This Week in Asia Episode 5: The CrunchPad Disaster

The whole crew is back this week with the news that dominate the tech and web landscape this week starting with one of the major news that rocked Singapore: the end of CrunchPad as declared by Mike Arrington (TechCrunch). Of course, we also discussed the launch of FourSquare and how the web app have progressed in Malaysia and Singapore and move with the news on Tyler’s BattleStations run-in with Mashable Open Web Awards, the launch of QQ International and whether it is a prelude of QQ going global. You can check out the podcast directly from here

From This Week in Asia:

• FourSquare in Malaysia and Singapore: The crew discuss FourSquare, a new location based mobile social networking app on Apple iPhone and Google Android, focus on how users in Malaysia and Singapore are really hooked on this app.
• Battle Stations by Tyler Projects have a run-in with Mashable Open Web Awards.
• Is Tencent Going Global With QQ International? by Gang Lu from Mobinode. We discuss whether it is a foreshadowing of QQ International going global with an experiment with the foreign expats in China.
• The End of CrunchPad with a fallout between Mike Arrington and Fusion Garage: We looked at the whole story with BL’s take in RIP CrunchPad from SGEntrepreneurs. We also discussed the possibilities and take a sympathetic view on why Fusion Garage decided to pull the plug on Mike Arrington and TechCrunch.
• Interesting events that are happening this and next week: Barcamp Shanghai happening on 5 Dec 2009 and Neoteny Conference in Singapore on 12-13 Dec 2009.