Frenzapp lets you share and discover iPhone apps easily

If you’re looking to find out what apps you should install on your iOS devices and which ones are popular among your friends, you might consider checking out Frenzapp by Singapore-based Bitsmedia. This free, cleanly designed app automatically discovers apps installed on your device and compares them to what your friends have on theirs.

Since it hooks up directly to Facebook, the entire process of friend finding is limited to simply asking them to install Frenzapp on their iPhones, iPod touches or even iPads. While it’s not a universal app, it works on iPads just as well. The latest version uses Facebook’s single sign on which means if you have the Facebook app installed and signed on, you don’t need to enter your Facebook credentials on Frenzapp. It then will immediately search the network for friends who also use the app.

Frenzapp not only finds your apps but it also recognizes the ones you’ve used most recently. You can tell the app which ones you like best and which ones you want to hide from your friends in case you don’t want them to know you’re a big fan of Glee for example. It also tells you what apps are currently on sale, which is useful if you’re a deal hunter.

Macworld went one step further to find out how Frenzapp manages to do its app discovery without getting slapped by Apple’s app reviewer. As it turns out, it uses the same method that file management apps like Good Reader use to see what other apps can open a particular document. That is why Frenzapp manages to see some apps but not others. Those apps that have data sharing enabled will be picked up by Frenzapp. Those who don’t, won’t.

The power of Frenzapp won’t be realized until a large number of your friends install the app on their iOS devices as the entire mechanism is based on human recommendations. The app heavily relies on Facebook so if you’re averse to the largest social network on the planet, unfortunately you’re out of luck. Otherwise, it’s arguably a better way to discover apps that are relevant to you than Apple’s own Genius tab on the App Store.

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QQi, It Is Tencent’s International QQ Messenger

After nearly two years experiment, Tencent will officially release its international version of QQ messenger, named QQi. The QQi is available in English, Japanse and French. “It is intended for users worldwide to connect with their Chinese friends, clients, customers, or just about anyone anywhere in the world.” reads from its press release.

According to Marc Violo,  Product Manager of QQi, he said, “One year after the release of the beta version targeting foreigners living in China, QQi currently already has over 2 million registered accounts with an average of 170,000 daily unique users in and out of China.”

Apart from QQ’s core IM functionality, QQi is trying to be more helpful for foreigners to explore anything China
related from job opportunities, news or language learning tools, to events, travel deals, directories and videos. The service has already partnered with a range of large local partners, such as the travel portal Ctrip.com or local news paper ChinaDaily.com and will in the future integrate more third party apps from local and global players. Foreigners will also benefit from Tencent patented IM technology – an innovative file transfer feature which allow you transfer large files faster and easier.

A lite version of QQi is also available for Mac and iPhone. The most interesting part for me is that, Marc also mentioned that in early 2011, they would release its first English language social networking site and integrat it into the existing information portal www.imqq.com and also seamlessly synchronized with the QQi. As Facebook is not available in China, whether Tencent’s English social networking site be accepted by foreigners for better communications could be quite interesting to find out.

Is Tencent serious about international market now or in near future? Or still it focus on anything to do with China?

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Tencent QQ launches international IM v1.0; announces English language SNS

Tencent, the largest Internet company in China and best known for their instant messenger product QQ, today announced the launch of version 1 of their QQ International (QQi 1.0) IM.

 

The international version of China’s most popular IM is now available in English, Japanese and French and is intended for users worldwide to connect with their Chinese friends, clients, customers, or just about anyone anywhere in the world. The client can be downloaded for Windows based PCs at www.imqq.com. Additionally a light version of QQi with stripped down functions is available for Mac, iPhone and iPad.

The Chinese version of QQ currently has around 600 million active accounts. Marc Violo, Product Manager of QQi, said that the beta version of the multilingual client which was targeting foreigners living in China only, reached over 2 million registered accounts with an average of 170,000 daily unique users in and out of China.

 

Competition for MSN and other international IMs?

According to Marc Violo QQi is not looking to compete with existing multilanguage IM's such as Microsoft MSN or Skype but aims to target the sofar unserved niche of cross-border/cross-language communication between China and the rest of the world. Apart from its core IM functionality, QQi offers its users a variety of free apps to explore anything China related from job opportunities, news or language learning tools, to events, travel deals, directories and videos. The service has already partnered with a range of large local partners, such as the travel portal Ctrip.com or local news paper ChinaDaily.com and will in the future integrate more third party apps from local and global players.

 

Tencent announces launch of English language Online Social Network in Q1/2011

The far more momentous news compared to the QQi 1.0 launch is however that at the same time Tencent also announced the coming launch of a new English language SNS as early as January 2011. According to the press release the service will be integrated into the existing information portal www.imqq.com and seamlessly synchronized with the QQi IM.

 

Those familiar with Tencents history will remember that also domestically it first was the IM product that was used to penetrate the market before adding more web and mobile services such as QZone, which eventually developed into China's largest online social network. It remains to be seen if QQi will indeed just stay a community platform for China-related topics or if Tencent will eventually try to compete with global social networks, foremost Facebook.  The company holds around 10 billion RMB in cash reserves and a 10% stake in Digital Sky Technologies Ltd., a Russian investment firm that again is a shareholder of Facebook and Zynga.

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Maxthon Released Its Mobile Version for Android

Maxthon, one of the most popular browsers in China has just released its mobile version, named Maxthon Mobile for Android. Maxthon Mobile comes with some nice features which are pretty easy to use:

• RSS reader – allows you to read rss feeds on mobile
• Super Gesture – allows you to create, close and switch tabs without click.
• Download – support resuming downloads, and you are able to view/play pictures/videos downloaded.
• Sync – allow you to sync the data, such as bookmarks between your desktop Maxthon and mobile version
• Multi-tabs – like Maxthon, you can open a page in a new Tab.

Maxthon has been in the browser market for years, but never officially released any mobile version before, even for Symbian which still dominates Chinese smart phone market. According to Analysis International’s latest report, by end of Q3 2010, the number of active users who are using third-party mobile browser has reach 100million in China. The market is shared by UCWeb (55.4%), Opera Mini (19.3%), Tencent Mobile browser (9.87%)  and 3G.cn browser etc.

It’s not too late. Given the fact that Maxthon desktop takes around 22% Chinese browser market share, Maxthon Mobile definitely has the chance to be a strong player in mobile browser market, if they are really serious about it.

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Is Groupon coming to Indonesia?

A couple of weeks ago we reported on the acquisition of a few Asian Groupon clones as well as the company’s expansion plans to the Southeast Asian region. While it explicitly mentioned Singapore, Hong Kong, The Philippines, and Taiwan, it said nothing of the rest of the ASEAN countries.

All of the sudden, thanks to a tip from @farry, we discovered that a sushi ad on Facebook led to a Groupon-like page in Indonesian and presented visitors with a registration page for an Indonesian language newsletter.

Upon registration, subscribers receive a message saying that they will be the first to know when local daily deals begin and that Groupon will make its debut in Indonesia in a matter of weeks.

The site’s address is Groupon.biz and is inaccessible unless you had the full link. However, a whois lookup revealed that it was registered by Groupon Inc. from Chicago, while the links at the bottom of the site lead to Groupon’s UK pages. Adding a piece of the puzzle, Groupon.co.id apparently has been registered by CityDeal GmBH which was purchased by Groupon earlier this year.

While all signs seem to point to the site being legit, we can’t confirm it at the moment but surely we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, there are apparently 11 Indonesian daily deals site that has been launched in the past year including Valadoo and Lapar which were just launched very recently. The current leaders in the Indonesian deals space are Disdus and DealKeren.

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Intel And Global Foundaries To Create 2,400 Tech Jobs In U.S.

New chip production plants are a clear sign that America has far from given up on staying globally competitive in key industries.
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Indian Internet Content Business in 2010 – Flat Traffic growth [Have We Hit the Ceiling?]

Last year, we carried an article covering the near-flat growth rate of content portals in India and it’s the time of the year, when we revisit the same stats for 2010 [2010 recap].

What has significantly changed in 2010? Apparently, nothing!

Take a look at the Comscore (* ) data (India traffic/Unique Users only) – the only portal which has shown some decent sign of growth is Yahoo, while Rediff, HindustanTimes.com etc seems to have settled down at their respective levels.

That brings us to a core question – is there a ceiling to content business in India? (if yes, then Yahoo seems to be almost there?)

If no, then are these content players just not innovating enough?

I’d like to believe the latter, as most of these companies do not offer any fresh perspective or insight (most of the content sites in India are news aggregators).

Of course, the traffic is a function of Internet penetration in India and consumption habits, but the reality of the matter is that very few content sites in India offer compelling content (i.e. beyond bikini pictures).

What’s your take on the content business in India? Do we lack content creators? With the advent of new media, do you feel the winds of change?

* Please note: One might say that comscore data for India is not reliable (as Comscore doesn’t track cybercafe data), I’d argue that content sites like these are mainly visited by professionals during office hours and data is representative of the reality (and should be used for guesstimating relative traffic).

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Groupon Japan To Land KDDI Cellphone Official Portal

Groupon Japan, a subsidiary of the international leading flash coupon service Groupon, announced their new alliance with Japan’s No.2 cellphone carrier KDDI on 14th.

According to the KDDI’s release [J], KDDI will open “au one coupon”, coupon-only portal site under its official cellphone portal site “au one”, which is available on all KDDI au feature phone internet access service EZweb on December 20th.

Groupon Japan will launch a mobile site “Groupon Mobile” as an EZweb mobile site on 14th. Two sites will work collaboratively.

KDDI au is also planning to pre-set “Groupon for Android” on their coming Android phone. KDDI users will be able to pay to Groupon seamlessly with their cellphone bill, both on feature phone and their Androids.

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Kanazawa Mayor Candidate Challenges Twitter-Banning Japan’s Election System

On November 28th at Kanazawa city, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan there was a mayor election. The two leading candidates, incumbent Tamotsu Yamade [J], 79, and Yukiyoshi Yamano [J], 48, competed closely, gained 56,840 and 58,204 votes respectively. Only 1,364 difference.

The things causing a fuss is, the young winner Yamano’s team reportedly had been using Twitter during the campaign period, which violates the Japan’s public office electian law which bans all “documents and drawings” distribution are prohibited.

According to Mainichi, not Yamano himself did not update his Twitter but his secretary and the chief of internet strategy, who runs IT company, made many tweets with attaching candidate’s photo like addressing.

The election committee was said to caution Yamano’s office more than 3 times, and also informed Ishikawa prefecture police, but the police did not make caution. A topsider of the police commented that it was difficult to prosecute as lifting of the Internet ban is in recent trend.

The chief of internet strategy said that he understood that it was illegal, but thinks okay unless the result of the election gets revoked.

via Mainichi

See Also:

Japan’s Internet-Banned Election Probed By Voice Over Twitter

Japan Kicks Off Twitter-Free Election Campaign – TIME

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Remote Tech Support Company iYogi Raises $30 million

Gurgaon based remote tech support company, iYogi has raised $30 million (Series D) from Sequoia Capital and existing investors (i.e. Canaan Partners, SVB, SAP Partners and DFJ).

iYogi provides comprehensive direct to consumers and small business remote tech support; and has more than 200,000 consumer and small business customers across four continents for its annual subscription alone. The fresh round of funding takes the total amount to $58 million and the funding will be used to for upgradation of its technology and scaling up the distribution channels (the company plans to expand in Europe and emerging markets).

iYogi currently has 4000+ technology experts provide tech support to more than 200,000 annual subscribers and claims satisfaction rating of 95%. The company plans an IPO in the coming six months.

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99Tests Brings Crowdsourcing to Software Testing

As a small business/startup, one of your wishe would be to really decrease the GTM (Go-To-Market) time and focus on the core (i.e. development) and have a QA team that actually does an independent testing.

Right now, in all probability – you are the one who is coding and testing (quite a disaster in making?) or you ask your friends to do the testing of your web app.

How about outsourcing your QA to the crowd? Well, Bangalore based 99tests brings crowdsourcing to software testing and serves as outsourced QA service to companies. The site went live on November 14th and has managed to garner 170+ testers who have logged 700+ bugs in the system (for three clients).

The way 99tests works is very simple – clients share a clear outline of testing scenario (supported OS/browser versions/use cases etc) and set the amount (gift coupon) – testers fight for the prize money and log as many bugs as possible.

Crowdsourcing – Long Term View?

Recently, US based startup, uTest (which is also into QA crowdsourcing) raised $13mn and the core business model behind uTest is that testers are compensated for bugs approved by the client.

As far as crowdsourcing part is concerned, it’d be interesting to see how 99tests keeps the love alive [Read : Wikipedia : Global Exodus of Editors Continues].

As far as the business model is concerned, 99tests charges a fix amount to clients (with certain promise on the number of bugs filed) and 70% of the client fees is distributed to testers participating in that project (80% among top three testers and the bottom 20% get as per their contribution in terms of number of bugs).

The major challenge for the team is ofcourse to grow the number (and quality) of testers, but given that this is started by professionals from QA industry, I’d expect them to do quite a bit of viral marketing.

Most importantly, the long term roadmap should be to get into higher pain point (which translates to $$$s) areas (like load testing, regression etc) as opposed to unit testing.

What’s your view on 99tests?

An Interesting View point: Why Crowdsourcing tools are not meant for Startups?

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BigShoeBazaar Rebrands As Yebhi.com – The Story So Far

There are very few players in the Indian e-commerce space that have taken a bottom up approach in growing their inventory and business. RedBus and BookmyShow are amongst those and have been quite a success in doing so. BigShoeBazaar (Earlier Coverage) is one those few startups in the touch-and-feel product space that has managed to gain traction. Started by Danish Ahmed, a Kanpur based shoe traders/Manufacturer’s son, after an experiment of selling blocked inventory over Rediff and Ebay, in 2007.

Around summers of 2009 Danish built a professional team bringing 3 experienced guys as co-founders, raised funding and started afresh.  The new team is based out of Delhi with a total size of 150.

BigShoeBazaar has invested a lot in getting the UI right and making the product viewing feature as life like as possible. Their six angle viewing feature is very impressive and the fact that they have maintained this feature for almost every product in offering is quite appreciable. They also power the official online stores of brands like Lotto and RedTape. The management does claim to be inspired by Zappos and has some very liberal 30 days no questions asked return policy. BSB also claims to be one of the few online stores to maintain its own inventory.

With its strength in supply chain management and experience of dealing with large shoe brands BSB has taken the offline franchisee route as well. They currently claim to have 10 offline stores and plan to expand to 100 over next 2 years. They even have wholesale cash and carry model for offline retailers. With so much offline development it makes it difficult to understand whether it’s a offline businesses that also sells online or the other way around.

BigShoeBazaar has also extended to apparels and accessories which given the niche that it had defined as a shoe store seems to be diluting the brand (Read: FlipKart No Longer Just A Bookstore, Starts Selling Mobiles and More [Brand Dilution?] ).

The store currently claims to be shipping 1500-2000 products daily and see max of 2-3% goods being returned for any reason.
Here’s what Danish had to say on his the team and the new category of products.

Ecommerce is a recent phenomenon that has now started growing in india. Because its a new industry, a lot of people believe its an easy business to start and succeed in. However, its not.

An ecommerce site is like a large retail store, with the competition and customer reviews one click away. That means you are either the best, 24x7x365.25, or nothing.

Unless you have hardcore knowledge of supply chain management, logistics, retail and technology, building a large, sustainable ecommerce company, would be very difficult.

All four of us met through a common reference and when we discussed the idea of building an ecommerce company, it made a lot of sense for us to do it as a team because of the complementing skills and experience we brought together.

The team at BSB brings years of experience in very large scale operations of retail, logistics and technology. That enables us to act much better, faster and with a lot less mistakes than our competition and i think in that long run, that would become a significant differentiator.

Moving from footwear to clothing and other lifestyle categories, is a natural extension of our strength in sourcing as well as customer segmentation. The niche however is not the category we are selling, it is the experience we are delivering.

BSB has recently started re-branding itself as Yebhi.com, probably to come out of the perception of a shoes only store. Which is indeed a good move and a better brand name to promote.

What’s your take? Have you ever bought shoes online?

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