UC Released UC Paradise, an Open Platform For Mobile

UC Mobile, the owner of the most popular browser for mobile UC Browser, has released a new product called UC Paradise aiming to be an open platform for mobile. UC Browser claims over 100million users and 50billion monthly pv and over 400million downloads. The company hopes UC Paradise will be the game-changing product in Chinese mobile industry because as an open platform it for the first allows third parties to build their own applications on it sharing UC Browser’s millions’ users. In other words, UC wants its UC Paradise to be like Facebook’s open platform, but for mobile.

UC Paradise provides three key features: social networks, location-based service (LBS) and Flash games center. Third parties are welcome to develop applications (especially Flash games) on UC Paradise platform, with the access to UC’s huge user base and even users profile including location. Currently, several popular Flash games developed by third-parties have been operated on UC Paradise. As for the revenue-share, Li Mingyuan, VP of UC Product says, “At this stage, revenue is not UC Paradise’s focus. I can guarantee third parties would not be disappointed.”

Currently UC Paradise (http://u.uc.cn) can be running on all Symbian S60, Java, Android, PPC and M8 version of UC Browsers. For iPhone users, since it’s not Flash supported, users can only play wap-based games. The most controversial part is that UC Paradise can also scan contact list on user’s mobile phone and auto-link them to their real-life friends who are also registered. Although UC leaves this function as an option, some users still complains UC might leak users’ privacy.

As the company says, UC Paradise will be the most important product in next several years. When UC Browser first enters the market, most users love it because it can save lots on the bandwidth and also load the page faster as all web pages are optimized for mobile device. However, with the fast development of 3G networks (cost is also gradually cut down) and more and more smart phone like Android phones and iPhone in the market,  UC Browser for the long term will be losing its core advantage. On the other hand, UC is also facing a tough competition from Tencent which has its own mobile browser (UC also complains that some ideas/features in Tencent’s mobile browser are copied from UC Browser). To be sustainable and reinforce its market leader position, Open is best strategy for the company.

Need to mention that, UC has also started its expanding to international market, especially south-east Asia market. UC Browser is now available in Russian, Vietnamese and Indonesian.

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The Top 10 Dream Employers in Chinese Internet Industry

Global Times and Universum yesterday released its “Chinese Dream Employers 2010″. In the Internet & e-commerce Industry category, Google is ranked the No.1 for Chinese in 2010, despite its market share decreased in past several months. Tencent and Baidu took the second and third.

Here is the full list for the Top10 Dream Employers for Chinese in Internet & e-commerce Industry:

1. Google – 18.29%
2. Tencent – 16.56%
3. Baidu – 16.44%
4. China Mobile – 14.96%
5. Alibaba – 14.46%
6. Apple – 10.88%
7. Microsoft – 8.78%
8. China Telecom – 8.65%
9. Shanda – 7.91%
10. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China – 6.92%

Easy to see that 7 out 10 companies in the list are local, Chinese internet is hard for foreign companies.

[news source: http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2010-12-18/13265000150.shtml]

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Sky-mobi – a disappointing IPO

Recently, many Chinese tech companies were able to have very successful IPO in the U.S. But Sky-mobi, which listed on Dec 10, was an exception to this rule.

First of all, it scaled down its IPO size, from raising US$150 million to US$58 million.  Its share price also dropped significantly after the IPO.  It closed at US$5.3 a share last Friday, 33% less than its IPO price of US$8.

The Hangzhou based company is in fact running a very lucrative business.  It runs an app store over low-end phones in China.  Most of these phones are manufactured in the Guangdong or Shenzhen, using MediaTek chips.  They are the so-called Shanzhai Ji.

Sky-mobi app store is called “Maopao”.  But most of the 400 million plus users who had used it in the last 2 years were not aware of this.  Because it is preloaded on half of the Shanzhai Ji, through Sky-mobi’s relationship with the mobile phone designer houses.

The app store has over 700 applications.  And it relied on China Mobile or China Unicom to collect payment via the operators’ value added service providers (SP), such as Kongzhong.

Problems occurs when the operators wants to change their policies, which happens frequently.  Sky-mobi found it could not charge its users when China Mobile tightened its user protection policies in late 2009.  The problem extended to this year.

In fact, it is heard that Sky-mobi once hoped to get listed in March this year.  But the sudden drop in revenue made it changed its plan.  (It also changed its  investment bank.  Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, etc. were no longer involved.)

From the hindsights, Sky-mobi might be better off not to list at all.  Not every business are suitable for the public market.  Some might be better to be run as a private firm.

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Give.sg One Year Later

This article was contributed by the team at Ideas.Inc, an annual business competition organised by the Nanyang Technopreneurship Center.

When buddies Aseem, Yu Ming, Raziuddin and Zi Huan decided to set up their latest venture Give.sg more than a year ago, they already had a successful and profitable business venture, JumboSupper behind them, set up at no cost, during their university days at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

With graduation day looming, they knew they had to put their enterprising minds together again, this time, to pursue their common passion of helping to change and make the world a better place.

They realised the many issues that exist in today’s society and decided to make a difference, no matter how big or small the impact would be. Their solution? To socially evangelise everyone towards a good cause and thus ‘give back’ to society through either monetary or item donations, participating in fund-raising activities or other good causes.

Give.sg is a web portal that allows anyone who wants to raise awareness or funds for their special cause, to set up their very own page dedicated to that cause. It uses social media marketing tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and emails to reach out to a wide network of people for contribution to the cause. And a simple eNets payment mode means a donation is made hassle-free. It is like shopping online, except you are doing good for a special cause, and making a difference to someone’s life.

So far, Give.sg has served over 30 charities based in Singapore, and reached out to more than 3,000 donors, raising a whopping $250,000. Its latest fundraiser campaign “Grow a Mo to Help a Bro” goes to assist male cancer patients in Singapore through the Singapore Cancer Society.

Guys can participate by having a clean shaven face when they begin and grow a classy moustache for the rest of the month. They would need to take pictures of the process and upload them regularly on their preferred social networks to reach out to donors. Ladies are encouraged to spread the word to their male friends to take part in this ‘hair-raising’ experience that aims to raise $50,000.

When Give.sg first started out, it wasn’t all a bed of roses. They had to raise the right capital, brainstorm for the perfect business plan, and then to rally support for people to believe in their idea. Joining the Ideas.Inc. Business Challenge 2010 gave them that huge boost they needed.

Their idea impressed the judges so much, they were shortlisted to be one of the six finalists and later even went on to win the competition. They received funding up to S$65,000, mentorship and entrepreneurship training to better manage their young business, and in addition received $15,000 in prize money!

A year after winning the competition, Give.sg has proven to be a success, and they hope to further innovate in their area of doing social good, by helping people from more countries, all races, all backgrounds and transcend these physical and cultural barriers through the use of even more advanced technology.

If you have an idea you’ll like to materialise, wait no further! Take part in Ideas.Inc., an annual business competition organised by the Nanyang Technopreneurship Center for aspiring entrepreneurs aged 26 years of age and below. Ideas.Inc. provides significant funding, mentorship and skills enhancement workshops for its successful participants. Ideas.Inc can also be found on Facebook.

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Meizu M9 hands-on videos

This video gives a detailed look of M9. The whole phone looks very decent, and sort of similar to its predecessor M8.

The video above show’s the UI of the phone. M9 runs Android 2.2, but it gets a highly customized UI, as you might have expected, with similar style to M8. As you could see from the video, the UI is quite straight forward and easy to use. Also, the response is very smooth.

This video display picture browsing and multi-touch. The sliding speech are very fast.

This video shows M8’s ability to display 1080p videos. It supports numerous video formats.

[Source: Youku]

• Meizu M9 got unboxed
• A clear picture of Meizu M9 from J.Wong
• Meizu starts M8 Android open source project at Google code
• Rumored spy shots of Meizu M9 surface
• Meizu M9 Knockoff is out
• Meizu M8 new UI demoed on video
• Meizu mPad? Meizu CEO J.Wong says ‘No’
• Video: Meizu M8 runs Android, showing responsive touch control
• Video: Meizu M8 Vs iPhone
• Meizu M8 new UI showed in the video

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Meizu M9 got unboxed

Read this post for Hands-on videos.

For those crazy Meizu fans Meizu M9 is really a long anticipated phone that they’ve been talking about more than a year. Right now the launch day has been very close, and the phone is expected to arrive before Christmas, or the New Year at latest. Today the phone has been delivered to many tech websites for reviewing. Though before there’re some leaked pictures of the prototype, this time is the debut of the product version. Meizu M9 packs a 1Ghz Samsung S5PC110 processor, 3.5 inches 960*640 capacitive touchscreen, 512MB RAM, a 5-megapixel camera, and a 1370mAh battery, and sports WCDMA radio. The OS is Android 2.2, with customized UI that’s like alike M8’s. The price is about 2499 Yuan (about $367 USD ).

[Source: Chinese Engadget]

• Meizu M9 hands-on videos
• A clear picture of Meizu M9 from J.Wong
• Meizu starts M8 Android open source project at Google code
• Rumored spy shots of Meizu M9 surface
• Meizu M9 Knockoff is out
• Meizu M8 new UI demoed on video
• Meizu mPad? Meizu CEO J.Wong says ‘No’
• Video: Meizu M8 runs Android, showing responsive touch control
• Video: Meizu M8 Vs iPhone
• Meizu M8 new UI showed in the video

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Review: Accord @Pad Android Tablet [Best Bet for INR 9,999]

Accord launched its @Pad Android Tablet a few months back and we have been playing with the device for the last 2 months to share our review (as a consumer).

Lets first get to the specifications of the Android Tablet from Accord [@Pad, P270].

@PAD is a  mobile Internet device (MID), multimedia-capable mobile device providing Wireless Internet Access and offers following features

• 128 MB RAM.
• 2 GB HDD (supports upto 16GB).
• 7inch TFT.
• Resistive Touch Screen.
• Android 1.7.
• Supports Wifi , 3G and Ethernet.
• One can connect external keyboard, mouse and HDD (what a relief!).

Review: Accord @Pad

Form Factor

Much better than Infibeam Phi. And that’s because the controls are on the left hand side. Unless you are a left-hander, you will find it much easier to hold the tablet on your left hand, use thumb to control the menu and use your right hand for navigation/typing.

Rating: 4/5

Touch

Accord @Pad has resistive touch screen and it works as-expected. If you are hooked to iPad, you won’t find this very cool (goes for all the resistive touch screen devices).

There is no magic here, but the important part is that you don’t really need to spend a lot of time calibrating. And in general, there isn’t much of a lag and as I said, touch works as you expect it to (a lot of devices do not fall under this category!).

Rating: 3.5/5.

Battery Life

My typical tablet usage mostly revolves around checking email, playing games and IM (i.e am mostly online activity) and the tablet lasts peacefully for 2 days.
Battery life isn’t as great as iPad, but its similar to any Nokia smartphone – i.e. if you use it like a PC, you charge it like a PC.

Rating: 3/5.

What’s Really Cool?

The fact that you can connect external mouse, keyboard, HDD to the device. This takes away any issue you will ever have with the touch screen. Personally speaking, this is a huge savior and scores a ++ over other existing devices.

What’s Not So Cool?

The device runs on Android 1.7 and so far there hasn’t been any update from the company on the upgrade (to 2.1 atleast?). It’s the same case with Infibeam Phi, which runs on Android 1.5 [Olivepad runs on 2.2].

Indian companies, if they have to compete with global players will need to focus on technology and I hope to see an upgrade in the next few weeks.

Concluding Thoughts

The price of Accord Apad is Rs. 9,999/ and this is probably the best bet if you are looking to buy a tablet as a secondary device. Strongly recommended for enterprise/sales team, as the tablet offers good feature-to-price parity.

We look forward to Android version upgrade and will update this review accordingly.

Aside, I am not sure whether Android really is geared for smartphone – infact, the more Android tablets I use, the more I end up with an i-Itch.

What’s your take on Android?

[Review Reproduced from Gadgethon]

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56.com Has Breakeven for Two Quarters, IPO Within Two Years

Stimulated by Youku and Tudou’s IPO-dream coming true, Ms. Zhang Juan, founder of 56.com, the Guangzhou-based third largest video-sharing site in China finally said to the media, the company is planning to be listed within next 2 years. And Ms. Zhang also said that the company has breakeven in past two quarters.

Launched in April 2005, 56.com now has over 60million registered users,  over 120million average daily PV, 42 millions average daily unique visitors and total video play times have reached 1billions.

Unlike Youku which follows Hulu+Netflix model, Ms. Zhang emphasized that 56.com wants to be the Chinese YouTube focus on user generated content (UGC). ‘We believe the essence of Internet is to share and everyone can be engaged’ Zhang said, ‘Hulu’s model can work in states where the copyright market is much more mature. But in China, the copyright market is not well regulated at all, companies are burning too much money on it.’

Focusing on users’ interactivity and UGC, 56 does differentiate itself from other video sites. Comparing the main page of three sites, Youku, Tudou and 56, you can easily tell the difference. On Youku, Tudou, the top navigation menu are Movie, Music, TV Programs and Video, but on 56, you see the menus like Video, User Homepage, Album and Game. Furthermore, 56′s entertainment-centric video content also attracts millions of young people which are favorite target audience for brands and advertisers.

Till today, 56 only raised $30million fund which sounds quite impressive. So are we expecting the first profitable Chinese video site being listed in near future?

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CodeAndroid Developer Job Matching Event 8 Jan 2011

Is your company in need of Android developers? Do you spend countless time attending industry events looking for them but haven’t had much success? Or are you an experienced Android developer looking for promising companies to join or interesting projects to show your 1337 skills?

CodeAndroid Singapore is pleased to announce that the next event taking place in January 2010 will be one you don’t want to miss if you fit any of the description above.

We would like to invite 6 companies to join us in a back-to-back pitching session to compete for attention of developers. Get on stage for 5 minutes and pitch your start-up or companies to attract Android developers to build the next big project.

We would also like to invite 24 experienced developers who are searching for start-ups or companies building exciting products to join. If you have published applications or games in the Android market and love developing on the platform, this is your best chance to meet companies and network with like-minded developers. Who knows, the lot of you might just band together and start your own company.

There is a limit to number of participating companies and developers because we’ll actively screen them to ensure the best get to join.

The format of the event is as follows:

Pitching: 6 companies take turn pitching to the whole group of Android developers. Each gets 5 minutes on stage.
Speed dating: Developers take turn going through all 6 company booths and “sell” their outstanding development skills.
Networking: Carry forward conversations should you, company or developer, find a match.

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Event Details

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When: Saturday, Jan 8th, 2011
Time: 1pm to 3pm
Where: Google Singapore, L35, 8 Shenton Way, Singapore 068811

To sign up: Companies register here, Android developers register here.

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Latest Startup Jobs – 18 Dec 2010

If you are reading SGEntrepreneurs, you are probably already partial to startups, perhaps having founded one yourself or are working in one.

If not, why not consider joining a dynamic startup to see for yourself what it is like working with just two other people in your entire company?

If you are looking for a job as a developer, programmer, or you want something in business development, sales, or perhaps you are a designer and looking for creative jobs, check out these newly listed open positions at these diverse startups.

PHP Developer at Conversion Hub (A Microsoft BizSpark startup!)

Webmaster System Administrator at Foxysales

Chief Architect – Modelling at Rapsodo

Elearning/Gaming PHP/JAVA/HTML5+JS at Baby Carrot

View previous post.

Visit the portal for more job vacancies.

Dedicated at startups, a job listing at Triple Point Job Board can cost as low as $25 and together with our partner sites, we have combined monthly pageviews of 0.25 million that reach individuals who love code, beautiful design, innovative businesses and creative thinking. For a job seeker who wants to work in startups, this is a perfect tool to find that position that you’ve been looking for. It costs nothing to browse and apply for a position.

Image courtesy of arxetures, CC.

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What Really Really Happened to Yahoo? [A Perspective]

[I wrote this article after reading Paul Graham’s ‘What happened to Yahoo’ (published about 3 months back) to share some of my observation/experience at Yahoo. I earlier decided not to publish this, but recent news/confusion about Yahoo's Delicious shutdown really got me to hit the 'Publish' button.]

First of all, let me tell you that Yahoo is a great company to work for – especially if you are a geek and enjoy hacking. Yahoo has a great working culture and is a lot more open organization than Google or Facebook.

Having said that, Yahoo is one of those companies who have simply lost the game – not because of external environment, but purely because of internal decisions, politics and the status-quo loving middle management.
Yahoo had the strongest hold in ‘social’ space (don’t you think that Yahoo groups was one of your most active/intimate social network), but today, it’s no way close to Facebook when it comes to social. Same with search, mail and pretty much each and every property Yahoo was known for.

So what really happened? Well, here are a few observations from my experience working for the giant (between 2007-2009).

Decision @Snail Pace

My first job in Yahoo was to sunset one of the most well known brand that Yahoo owned. I worked with several geographies, BU owners and took ~2 months to convince them that the deed is worth it (falling traffic/old code not worth rewriting/new web2.0 easy-to-build services etc etc). The biggest challenge was convincing the super hero, i.e. the boss (lets call him ‘Mr. X’) who was supposed to allocate $$ (i.e. resource) for the same (he never said NO, but simply kept delaying the decision).

Mr. X never agreed to the act (he kept citing 2004‘s consumer brand research report,  when this property was among the top 5 Internet brands in US) – he kept delaying any decision and resorted to ‘all is well and stale’ strategy.
Over a period of time, he moved on (he was promotedn within the BU!) and interestingly, his replacement (lets call him Mr. Y) took only 30 minutes to understand why we need to sunset this property. More than the data reason (i.e. falling traffic), he agreed on the strategic reasons to sunset this specific property. That was a milestone day for me (and the product).

Question for you : Who was let go, in one of the layoff season? The guy (Mr. X) who believed in status-quo or the guy (Mr. Y) who believed in shaking up the status quo?

Answer: Mr. Y!

Why Y? I guess he was too fast for the company?

Lack of Internal Evangelist/Product Champions

How many Yahoo employees use GTalk over Y! IM for personal purpose? Can Yahoo search team convince their 12,000+ colleagues (or what’er is the number these days) to use Yahoo search (and share feedback/suggest features) and not Google?

Can product managers stand up and answer this? Why is it that there are multiple teams building similar products (with few feature difference, but none of those qualify as a product).

This reminds me of a talk by Paul Buchheit (of Gmail fame), where he mentioned how important is it to have atleast 100 internal happy users, before you launch a product. Most of Yahoo new products have failed because they were launched for wrong reasons (read the next point). There hardly are passionate internal users of the system and that’s because there is a sincere lack of internal evangelists (or rather, believers) in the company.

Yahoo Needs Apple Like Focus

Buck Stops…But Where?

Remember Spotm? The social network from Yahoo? Remember Mash? Remember Searchmonkey? What about Y! Pipes?

Who owns the responsibility of such products (and their failure)? Trial and error is part of the game, but the most important part is to ensure that there is an accountability to all these experiments (and ensure that there are more trials than failure).

Typically, once a product is launched – everybody in the product team gets promoted. They are moved to ‘more’ challenging opportunities. Celebration happens after product launch (launch=success!). But what after that? Many senior execs use product launch as a tool to move up the chain, leaving the product in the middle of nowhere.

The thing about Yahoo is that nobody owns the product – there are too many teams having a stake in the product and what you see is an experiment that is launched before appraisal cycle and is phased out later, citing ‘we had a good learning from this experiment’ reasons. This is what the ‘peanut butter’ email was all about.

Somebody needs to fix this and I hope ‘WTF’ CEO just does that. She needs to drop a *F bomb* somewhere inside the company.

Need for Hitler?

Apple has Steve Jobs. Google has the trio. Amazon has Jeff Bozos.

What about Yahoo?

You need a Hitler to drive business plus product decisions. Somebody just needs to be the bad guy (or girl). Yahoo needs one. Right now. Somebody who has great insights and vision for the Internet 2020.

Yahoo probably has (or atleast used to) some of the best engineers, but it’s the senior management that is to be blamed for its current state. A lot needs to be achieved – especially when it comes to accountability (can you really trust Yahoo if tomorrow they announce an API for LBS?). When was the last time you had an awesome feeling after using a Yahoo product?

There was a time when Yahoo was synonym with Internet, but then..

My 2 cents (after her $48mn salary) to Carol Bartz (or the next CEO) – Break the local power centers in the company. Get rid of all those who have stayed in the company for more than 7 years – they are a liability as they live in a ‘know it all’ state and are anti-change. You need fresh blood. And for god sake, stop bleeding (purple) please.

Yahoo needs to pivot, just like a startup. The time is now.

[Please note - I have moved on and like I said in the beginning of the post, I didn't plan to publish this (what you see is a much sober version), but the recent Delicious/MyBloglog etc story has washed away all the confidence I had in Yahoo (that they will make a comeback). I am switching off comments (a rare thing at Pluggd.in) as its time to focus on more constructive things. As far as Yahoo is concerned, I have met some of the most amazing geeks/product/sales guys during my stint in Yahoo and wish them all the best.]

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Alex Laurant on Asia’s promise of digital creativity

Alex Laurant is the senior art director, visual designer and concept artist for Studio LXL whose extensive resume extends into developing visual effects for PJ Hogan’s movie, Peter Pan, as well as helping to develop video games like Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire and Crysis.

Laurant was in Malaysia as a guest speaker for the Kre8tif Digital Content Conference, and he spoke to e27 on how the West Coast views the Asian creative industry, and how the region is moving forward in producing better digital content.

How does Hollywood view Asia when it comes to digital content creation?

The view that Asia is a low-cost labour source is not based on nothing, and it’s become a stereotype over the years. But a shift is happening now in Asia – we’re seeing more good content coming out of the region, and it’s part of the natural learning curve that’s developed over time. By working on something – no matter how menial or repetitive the animation is – people will learn more about the big picture and eventually plot their own course and create their own intellectual property.

There’s no shortcut to this learning – while governments here are finding their own ways to give birth to an industrial and cultural baby, it’s not something that can be done by imitating the West. The Hollywood model is inspiring and relevant in many way, but there’s a point that they stop writing the rules, especially where storytelling is concerned – that aspect has to be ethnocentric.

The challenge for countries to produce their own stories is to find the language that transcends borders, and be confident in their history and folklore that it becomes the building blocks for their own storybuilding archetypes. Hayao Miyazaki is one great example of how a country can be true to its own culture, while being successful in other countries.

What promise do you see emerging from the Asian region in the coming years?

We’re starting to see a growing sophistication of tasks being shipped out overseas – and more importantly, the satellite studios of big companies aren’t just saying that these are just an outsource studio, but a studio with its own cultural pride. They’re saying: ‘This is DreamWorks India’, or ‘This is LucasFilm Singapore’ with its own cultural pride. And that gives a lot of confidence within these countries to create their own works.

What are you looking forward to in the next decade in video games and movies?

In games there’s a lot more changes happening – many have observed that consoles are levelling off and stabilising. One of the big challenges in the past was a constantly changing platform, core tools and engine – how could you be an expert when your engine changes every two years? So that’s something good to look forward to. Also, mobile gaming and gestural interfaces are obviously going to be huge in the coming years.

As for movies that are dimensionalised (into 3D)? I’m frankly so down on these kind of movies – I don’t see them succeeding and you won’t see me crying about it a lot. In terms of the movie experience, IMAX is more mind-blowing than any of them.

Photo courtesy of Kre8tif Digital Content Conference.

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KuanTu, The Chinese Tumblr

KuanTu, a Beijing-based startup is offering a super easy online service for users to share their text, images, video, links. It is unlike blog because KuanTu only encourages user to easily share one link/image/video/text each time; it looks more like microblogging, but more complicated than it as the content you share there is not just text. KuanTu also offers users some personalization features such as personal url (like mobinode.kuantu.com), custom theme.

KuanTu reminds me of an English service called Tumblr. It’s quite interesting to know that Tumblr was founded back in 2007 and I even forgot I already had me registered long time ago when I am about to register a new account. Thanks to the beauty of microblogging, Tumblr seems back on track and grows super fast in past months and has just raised $30million early this month.

In the interview (in Chinese) with Jerry Sun, the founder of KuanTu, he did not give us much information about the future plan as well as the potential business model. However, when I read some coverage about Tumblr, I found two points worth sharing here:

1. Who is the target users?

We mentioned the service is similar to microblogging. Although it is more complicated and Twitter lover may find it is the drawback, it could be more fun. Karp, founder of Tumblr said Tumblr wants to be “the best place in the world for the best creative communities.” because the multi-media content can be easily shared there. On Sina’s Weibo, you can also share links/images/video, so you may ask how Kuantu could survive. But look at Tumblr vs. Twitter, it KuanTu can find a niche market, the chance is still there.

2. How to make money?

It’s hard in China, I have to say. Be honest, I am not so sure about KuanTu on its business model. Tumblr says it is making money from its customized themes. But in the local market here, that does not sound feasible.

Jerry said KuanTu would focus on the user experience at this stage, we wish they can bring us more interesting stuff in near future.

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Jason Della Rocca on the future of video game development

As the founder of Perimeter Partners, Jason Della Rocca (pictured) has provided guidance on strategy for video games industries across the world. The former executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) was in Putrajaya, Malaysia, as a speaker for the Kre8tif Digital Content Conference organised by MSC Malaysia and the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC).

We spoke to Della Rocca to get his opinion on the growth of the video games industry in Malaysia and Asia, and where he sees social and mobile gaming is headed to in the near future.

What’s your impression of how the video game industry like is in Malaysia?

To be frank, I expected things to be a lot more advanced and robust in the video game industry – I was a little surprised by the lack of maturity. I don’t really know enough having been in this country for a only short time, but my sense is that there’s an artistic talent pool here – there having been a focus on the animation and multimedia education here – but where video games are concerned, it’s still very nascent.

So what can the country do to move the industry forward?

It’s a tough question, and that’s what my consultancy group is set up to answer. On one hand, it’s important to have that aspect of talent – which this country has – but they don’t understand the aspects of business development, marketing, and revenue models. To have a viable industry, you need to have a mix between talented creatives and business-savvy people; otherwise video games will remain at an amateur level.

So the innovation needs to come from the business side, even though many don’t think that innovation comes from that aspect. To me, bringing in big foreign companies from the US is usually not the answer – they’re self-serving. They’re coming here not to develop the industry, but to take advantage of the local talent set or lower labour cost.

There are no obvious answers to that question. What we do is to understand what’s going on and see where the gaps are – be it in academia, government, or business development – and see what needs to be strengthened.

With the proliferation of mobile and casual games on platforms like the iOS and Android, do you see more young talent heading towards this direction, or are they still aiming towards the big game studios?

Young talent want to go into the traditional console game-space because that’s sexy. The flow of talent, especially the talent on the creative and production side see the most challenges in the console space, which can be a problem in many regions.

For example in South American countries like Brazil and Peru, you have up-and-coming talent who want to make the next HALO. ‘How do we compete with the Americans?’, they ask, but really, they shouldn’t even bother with it because in South America, the opportunities are in the casual and social games. This happens partly because of the lack of business understanding, so they blindly go into these marketplaces without pursuing what are more economically viable businesses.

Do you think the current trend of social and mobile games are a fad or bubble?

They’re not a fad by any means, especially if you look at the multi-million dollar valuations of Zynga, Playfish and Playdom. As far as bubbles are concerned – as long as there’s business innovation that continues on, then it won’t be one. If people assume they can do the same thing that Farmville did, then there’s a bubble about to burst.

With the rise of social games that are driven by the virtual goods economy, do you see more games being developed primarily to rake in more money from customers than it is about the playing experience?

The idea of design and business going hand-in-hand doesn’t sit too comfortably with many game designers. In the console space, the model was simple: here’s $20 million, now go make a great game that’ll get good reviews and sales. There’s no pressure on the designer to put in, say, a jump mechanic you need to pay for to enable further monetisation.

However, there is an interesting historical precedent to the microtransaction business model of social games we see today – which were the arcades. So many of these arcade games were designed to keep you putting quarters into the machine – the original microtransactions. Designers back then had to think: ‘okay, so how do we give players enough hope so that when they die, they’ll be compelled to put more quarters in?’ It’s not virtual goods, but it’s in the same realm, so I would say that the ones who frown on these social games are maybe just being snobbish.

What about the button vs button-less war going on between the Microsoft Kinect and PlayStation Move? How do you see that playing out?

It’s less about buttons or no buttons, but more about intuitive interfaces that are moving away from the 20-button controllers. My wife, for instance, loves playing with her Nintendo DS, and she didn’t even realise there were buttons because she uses the stylus – so she doesn’t see herself as a ‘gamer’ in the regular sense because she’s been intuitively playing a game. The touch interfaces on the iPad and iPod touch are other examples of intuitiveness moving forward – so it’s not that you’re using buttons or not, but more about intuitiveness of motion and gestures.

Photo taken from Wikipedia

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Nanapi, User-Generated Lifehacks Sharing Service Raises $3.8 Millon

Nanapi [J], a web service to share hacks posted by users, had acquired 3.8 million US dollars from Globis Capital Partners in Tokyo.

Nanapi is a service to share life hacks, called as life recipes in this service, posted by users. Users can post their own hacks easily via Nanapi works [J], and can earn points worth 100 to 10,000 Japanese yen.

It’s hard to find a similar service in U.S. but has  a similar concept hunch.com has; Making a guide for living by using the power of internet users.

Nanapi is currently getting 4.5 million pageviews via PC and 5 million pageviews via mobile per month. Nanapi is aiming to gather 100 million pageviews/month by the end of 2011.

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Tencent Is Opening As Promised, Further Thoughts on Chinese Style Openness

The mysterious Tencent, has released its probably the first open API today, API for Tencent’s microblogging platform. So that’s cool as Pony Ma has kept his promise: Tencent would be open within six month, at least he has taken the first step. If you know well about how Twitter grows so fast, you must understand the API is the obvious strategy. So I would assume you don’t need me to tell how good the API is.

As an big fan of Open technology and Open concept, I have been monitoring the evolution of open platform in China since the very beginning. The good news in local web industry is that more and more people (especially high level decision-makers) have reckoned open is the future, but on the other hand, some Chinese philosophy behind the Open concept might be more complicated than you thought. I am not saying it’s wrong, but it’s Interesting.

Open is also a competition

This is easy to explain. Basically, if your competitor has launched an ‘open’ platform, no matter if it’s necessary for you or if you have fully understood the value of opening or the market is mature for it yet. You must build up your open platform quickly. Recalling in 2008, 10 leading Social Networks announced together the support to OpenSocial, it turned out in the end most of those social networks just did it for PR purpose. Sina launched its open platform for its Weibo (microblogging) last month. As we have been covering a lot about Sina’s ambition and also given the fact that Weibo is so hot in China, Tencent’s first open platform is chosen on its microblogging service, surely is a must.

Service-oriented or Money-oriented

Open platform of course needs be monetized in the end. But look at Facebook, Twitter, when they got its open platform/API up, I don’t think they looked at money at that stage. It’s to sort of service-oriented. In China, the open API for some reason, is inevitably linked with $$$. The same example, end of day few of those social networks which supported OpenSocial were serious about the open platform. The reason is simple, OpenSocial API gives a good technical solution, but little about how to make money. And even more interesting, the thing could go from one extreme to the other. Instead of talking about monetizing the open platform, in China we could prepare rmb 20million fund for developers, which is super cool.

When you see all these mingled together, is it exciting as well as a bit strange?

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Price War: 360buy Vs. Dangdang

Two of the largest online retailers in China are having a price war.  One of them is Dangdang, a leading online book store in China that has just listed in Nasdaq. Another is 360buy, the largest online retailer in China by revenue and the most aggressive player in the industry. (Here is an article from local media: http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2010-12-17/00114993519.shtml.)

It all started on Dec 8, when Dangdang  had a very successful IPO in Nasdaq.  On the very same day, its competitors, Joyo and 360buy were slashing prices on books.  When Dangdang’s president, Li Guoqing, did his TV interview, he swore he was going to retaliate.  So that is it.  The price war began.

Li said Dangdang is selling everything (books, computers, cosmetics, etc.) at lower prices than its competitors.  And it prepares to back up its plan with a RMB 40 million war chest.  In response, 360buy further lowered its prices and it said it prepared to spent RMB80 million.

No matter what happen, it is certain that the price war will hurt Dangdang’s bottom line.  Share prices of Dangdang has been dropping since its IPO.  It is currently trading at US$25.41 a share, 26% off its peak of US$34.46.

Once again, it shows how brutal the Chinese market is.  Your competitors will always strike at your weakness.  Just when Dangdang needs to show its investors some profitability, its competitors start a price war.

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China is Changing Public Telephone Booths into Wifi Hotspots

I’ve just read an interesting article in the local media.  It said China is going to change its public telephone booths into Wi-Fi hotspots.  (Here is the article: http://tech.qq.com/a/20101217/000109.htm)

If that is the case, it will be great.  Firstly, ever since mobile phones became popular, the use of  public telephone booths is getting less and less.  The article said in some area of Guangdong, a telephone booth gets less than one person to use it in a day.  That is really a waste of resource, considering it has to be maintained regularly.

Secondarily, Chinese 3G services (no matter provided by China Mobile, China Unicom or China Telecom) are still slow and patchy.  With Wi-Fi hotspots to complement them, the user experience can be much better.  (I am personally on China Unicom’s 3G services for my mobile phone, and I am not very happy about it.)  Telephone booths, which are dotted in every corners of the streets, seems the perfect places for Wi-Fi hotspots.  At least for the cities.

The article mentioned, besides of telephone booths, the telecom operators are also trying to setup hotspots in restaurants, hotels, sport facilities, and so on.    If the idea is really implemented, they will turn every city in China into a giant Wi-Fi network for fast internet connection.

For me, as a user, the more hotspots the merrier.  Even better if their services are free.

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Buzzintown Gets into The Groupon Model – Get Your Own For $89

The excitement in the daily deals space is just starting to build it seems. We always were of the idea that local search/listings players should enter the Groupon clone model and the first player to jump into this is BuzzInTown.

Local events listing site BuzzInTown has launched a deals section featuring discount vouchers of restaurants and other lifestyle needs. The site currently features deals from Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. While there is no differentiator in the offering as compared to other clones but this move does make complete sense. A mix of content and deals is good to be able to sell without spamming the users as the users now have a reason to come to the site and the deals are eye catchers for an impulsive purchase.

Meanwhile, SnapDeal has launched a Getways vertical exclusively for holiday deals. SnapDeal is the biggest deals site in terms of traffic and owing to the heavy marketing expenditures they recently entered the Alexa top 100 (the hall of fame).

What i have learnt from few employees of some of the deals sites doesn’t sound very pleasant. Some are running out of cash and are looking for distress sale or changing the business model. The user acquisition cost doesn’t sound like they have an internal marketing team but rather outsourced the marketing to a bells-and-whistles online marketing company that generally large companies approach for one off campaigns.

The whole problem with this internet business model is the lack of friction to enter. You need a payment gateway and done. No body looks at the quality of the deals that is being hosted or how/why the traffic is going to come to the site. It is almost entering the blogging model. It is easy to set a WP blog and then all you have to do is post content. In few days you see no traffic coming and then abandon the blog.

If you are looking to join the party, make your own Groupon clone for as low as $89 (see the list of Groupon clone scripts).

Lets us know your views on this most talked about business model of they year.

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