2010 in Review–The Year When Mobile Startups Flew ‘Kites’

What about Kites? Well, Kites is a Bollywood movie that carried huge expectation, but went bust on the day 1 itself.

Flying Kites: In Love With Operator

Something similar happened with Mobile/VAS ecosystem in India and most importantly, with the Indian telecom industry.

Inflated Subscriber Numbers

500 million? 600 million?

Telecom operators reported skyrocketing number of 682 million subscribers (i.e. 58% penetration) in the month of September 2010.

Since spectrum allotment is done in proportion to subscriber base, telecom operators have enough incentive to inflate this number. September of 2010, TRAI shared the actual subscriber numbers which stands at ~70% of the reported numbers, i.e. 478 million.

2G Scam

The recent 2G scam is one of the worst scams in the country and while government demystifies the real story, expect lesser investment in this space.
Apart from the monetary loss (INR 1.76 L Crores), this has also brought shame and most importantly, eroded the confidence in India’s telecom story.

“When any industry comes under scanner, all the stakeholders also come under the scanner… It does affect credibility.” –[Quote  by Spice Mobility/ASSOCHAM president, Dilip Modi].

Mobile Startups : Funding Anyone?

Big Became Bigger – that’s the sweet and short summary of Indian mobile VAS industry.

Moreover, there hasn’t been a lot of action in funding space, as small players haven’t been able to go big and the good old story of 70:30 (Operator:VAS player revenue share) continues.

Aside, one of the most heartbreaking news for mobile startups was shutdown of Bharti Airtel Innovation fund (and lack of other funding stories in VAS/App space). And to add to this, some of the significant funding has happened from VCs outside India (which says a lot about Indian investors’ approach towards this ecosystem).

• Eko Raises Series A from US Based 4B Capital
• InMobi Raises $8mn from KPCB and Sherpalo Ventures

Does this mean that mobile startups need to go roaming (and can find a better match outside India, when it comes to funding)?

What about App Developers?

2010 witnessed the rise of mobile app stores in the country. Right from Aircel to Airtel – everybody has one, but no one is talking about monetization. Everybody is talking about their size, but no one is talking about the ecosystem or the economy of app stores.

There hardly are details of Operator’s roadmap regarding app stores and how are they going to work with app developers on the same. So far, it seems like a Scatter Gun Strategy.

The Good News

- Finally, 3G auction went through and we have already started seeing launch of 3G services. Content is the key here and expect app startups to rise to the occasion.

- Rise of Micromax. An inspiring ‘Made in India’ story, Micromax has certainly arrived and the company has been gaining ground owing to its foray into Android devices. The reason Micromax growth is so important for others to take note is not just because of the rising market share, but because of the fact that company has managed to find a product-to-market fit in an already crowded market (dominated by MNC brands).

To summarize, mobile VAS/APP ecosystem needs a fresh approach and most of the investors in this space aren’t the ones who will risk their $$s in one app, one vas offering. And that’s tricky for app/vas startups as it calls for dilution.

But the journey continues.

What’s your take on this ecosystem? What will 2011 mean for VAS/App startups?

[This is part of our series on 2010 Review where we bring the most significant coverage of digital industry in the Year 2010]

img credit

Link to full article

Read More

Best of the Week–Nokia QT, Munni [and more]

It’s been a slow week owing to holidays and as we continue to work on some of the interesting stuff for 2011, its also a time to look back at interesting happenings of 2010. Starting today, we will share 2010 in Review and look at significant milestones across industries.

Here are the top articles for week ending December 26th, 2010:

• Flipkart Acquires WeRead [Updated]
• Honesty Hits the Cloud [And Your Personal Data is For Sale]
• Mobile Usage Trends in India–Munni Tops the Chart
• What Nokia Could Do With QT But Did Not
• Cloud Caution: Look Before You Leap! [Myths]

Mobile SDK Map

Startups/Entrepreneurship

• 2010–The ‘Dabangg’ Year for Indian Internet Startups
• Want To Share Only With One In Your Social Network – Use Iddhis
• 3Pundits Helps Your Child Find The Nearest School [Education]
• Google Voice Search–How Varied Are Indian Accents [Torture Tests]
• Hyderabad Based BuyThePrice Secures First Round of Funding

Misc

• Nokia OVI Stats–3.5 Million Daily Downloads, Games Top the Paid Downloads
• Why Do We Contribute to Online Communities? [Anticipated Reciprocity]
• Jobs: PHP Developers, Designers, System Architect, CTO, QA [and more]
• Orkut Integrates with Picnik–Edit Your Pics
• News: National database of IMEI Number, LinkedIn Crosses 8 Million Members in India
• Wikileaks And Santa [PI Cartoons]

Gadgets

• Intel Atom Netbooks–Partners With Croma
• How to Secure Your Laptop (Data) from Theft
• Sony Introduces Next-Generation Blu-ray Disc Rewritable Drives
• Review: Accord @Pad Android Tablet

Link to full article

Read More

TechBeat on a break

Yes, even tech pundits need to spend some downtime every year, and so the TechBeat podcast is taking a two-week break for the holiday season. We’ll be back in 2011 with a brand new episode that would discuss the expectations of CES 2011, and a quick homage to the year that was 2010.

In the meantime, you can also tune into another Malaysian podcast produced by John Lim, the Life Online Show, which discusses the headline makers in Social Media and the Web. The latest episode brings together regular panelists David Lian from Text100 PR, David Wang from Buzzmedia Marketing, and Niki Cheong from The Star newspaper to talk about their most significant moments of 2010, including Google Wave, Malaysia’s #YoRais trend, and WikiLeaks.

For this Christmas season, the Life Online Show is also giving away one BlackBerry Curve 3G for Malaysian listeners — find out how you can win it here.

To view archives of previous TechBeat episodes, click here.

Link to full article

Read More

Disdus raises seed funding from East Ventures

On e27, not a week goes by without a story on at least one startup group buying site. This time, we turn our head to Indonesia. One of the country’s leading players in that space, Disdus, announced through a press release that it has raised seed funding from East Ventures, the VC famously represented by Willson Cuaca who’s been all over Indonesian startups for the better part of the year.

While the valuation and size of the investment have not been disclosed, East Ventures partner Batara Eto will join the company as part of the Advisory Board which already has Andrew Darwis, founder of Kaskus, on deck. Eto was, as many may have been aware, CTO of Mixi Inc., the largest social network in Japan. Having both persons on board brings substantial support to the company ahead of Groupon’s expected entry to Indonesia.

The two co-founders of Disdus, Jason Lamuda and Ferry Tenka, will continue to lead and maintain full operational responsibility of Disdus. Since its founding in August of this year it has sold more than 12,000 coupons to 70,000 customers with participants from various industries including entertainment, food and beverage, recreational sites, consumer technology, fashion, and many others.

Batara Eto had this to say about Disdus, ”As an investor in early-stage startups, we recognize huge potentials in the Indonesian Internet market. We are confident Disdus has the vision and execution ability to be an industry leader in the online social commerce business in Indonesia.”

Disdus adds yet another to East Ventures’s growing Indonesian portfolio which includes Apps Foundry , Tokopedia, Scraplr, and Urbanesia.

Link to full article

Read More

Alibaba and Taobao To Launch Its 2nd B2C E-Commerce Platform, Named WuMingLiangPin

With ~2million sellers, Taobao is leading the Chinese e-commerce market in terms of the traffic and the massive transaction volume daily, but people always question about how much revenue Taobao can actually contribute to Alibaba group as you know most of sellers on Taobao pay nothing for using the platform; Furthermore, more and more consumers starts complaining about the counterfeit sold on Taobao and trusting more on Taobao’s B2C platform Taobao Mall, which is one of the key reasons why B2C business is growing faster than C2C in China. In Taobao Mall, merchants need pay a yearly fee and be charged the commission fee, in some sense, Taobao Mall is doing a better job to monetize Taobao’s traffic.

Now Taobao and Alibaba want to drive B2C business faster and generate more revenue out of it. In January 2011, Alibaba and Taobao are to launch the 2nd B2C e-commerce platform, named WuMingLiangPin (literally means Not popular but with good quality). The officials explain the reason why they launch it: In order to become a seller on Taobao Mall, you have to have your own brand. But for quite a few merchants on Alibaba, they don’t have their own brand or their brand is not that popular, but there is good potential for them in the B2C market (i.e. selling product to individuals) as well. WuMingLiangPin is the platform built up for them.

In order to enter this new B2C platform, the merchant will be charged rmb 2980 per year as membership fee and also be charged some commission fee at certain rate. The key benefit for WuMingLiangPin member is that, like Taobao Mall, when consumer search for products on Taobao, the members will be listed at better position in the results for better exposure.

For consumers, the new platform could be a good news if Alibaba and Taobao can truly guarantee the quality. However, it might be killing thousands of small business owners on Taobao who will be losing lots of traffic unless they pay for the new platform.

Link to full article

Read More

Manga Fanatics Create Manga Gaming Platform

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

To most of us, watching anime or reading manga is just a past time, and beyond dressing up in our favourite character’s costumes, and collecting memorabilia, there really isn’t much else to do. But Sylvia Yao and Wu Di, both manga fanatics and gaming enthusiasts, decided they had to do something manga-related to fill the void that the growing social gaming scene had left behind.

Observing the growing interest in manga here in Singapore, and the many social games that have sprouted over the internet, especially social media platforms, it was only natural the duo felt marrying the two would then give manga fans access to a wide array of manga-styled games to add depth to their hobbies.

Manga Castle was finally born in January 2010, and so well-received by manga fans all over Asia, the US, Canada and the UK, it already has a growing community of more than 17,000 fans on its Facebook page. A feat that was made possible by their participation in various business competitions, most notably, the Ideas.Inc Challenge 2009, where they received $15,000 in prize money, another $100,000 through the competition’s Top Incubation Award, and mentorship and entrepreneurship training on top of that.

The seed money has allowed them to be able to hire a team of graphic designers and programmers, and they now have the capability to constantly improve their gaming engine for a more enriching experience for gamers.

What was originally a consumer-driven, subscription-based gaming portal, has also since evolved to become a platform that also attracts gaming developers to showcase their games. Manga Castle provides these gaming developers with the business intelligence they have gathered, through the gamers’ behaviours online, to ensure gaming developers are able to develop games that are now based on facts and science, instead of intuition that they’re traditionally used to. This then ensures developers build games that are profitable and have business sustainability.

With this business concept, Manga Castle expects to build an all-rounded manga community that is well-connected from gamer to developer, although business ideas continue to evolve with time and the needs of the community.

However, passion is the only constant in this journey. As Sylvia puts it, “Only when you are passionate about what you do, can you persuade others to buy in to your idea. Although we are still in the middle of this journey, our vision remains steadfast and I am still in awe of this journey of self-discovery.”

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.

Link to full article

Read More

The Global Mobile Internet Conference 2011 – coming in April

For people who want to know more about mobile internet in China, perhaps, they should attend the conference organized by Great Wall Club in the coming April.  http://gmic.greatwallclub.com/

I attended the event last year and found it very useful for making contacts and understanding the overall industry landscape.  I started my own study of the mobile internet in China afterwards.

This year the theme is “Asia to Global”.  How mobile internet trends & technologies, once only common within Asia, are spreading to various regions around the globe.

Every major figurehead in the mobile internet world is going to be there.  Confirmed speakers include Pony Ma, CEO of Tencent, Charles Chao, CEO of Sina.com, Joe Chen, CEO of Renren.com, Bill Huang, GM of China Mobile Research Institute, Richard Robinson, Co-founder & President of Youlu and Song Tao, CEO of SKY-MOBI.  LEI Jun, a renowned angel investor who has backed UCweb and many successful mobile internet companies will be there, too.

There will also be a startup competition – mobile internet startups from around the world can show off their services. As usual, the event will be held in Beijing, in the China National Congress Center.  And if you register in the next few days, you can still enjoy a 50% early bird discount.

For people don’t know the Great Wall Club yet, it is CEO member-based industry trade organization focusing on mobile Internet.  Many of the speakers mentioned above are members of the club.  And if you a CEO of a mobile company, perhaps you should consider joining them.

Link to full article

Read More

More Tencent Puzzle

Another question people frequently raise about Tencent is whether it can dominate whatever area it choose to enter. If a company competes with Tencent, will it loss for sure??

The truth is there are many incidents that Tencent was defeated by its competitors. For examples, in search engine, Tencent’s Soso cannot compete with Baidu. It is not even as popular as Google in China. Another example is online auction. Market share of Tencent’s Paipai is tiny compared with Alibaba’s Taobao.

Even small companies can win over Tencent if they try hard enough. Recently, I visited a Beijing based company, called Ganji. It runs a classified site in China, just like Craigslist. Ganji started in 2005 and within a year, there were over 500 Craigslist-like classified sites in China. Tencent also started its own. But by 2007, consolidation came. Lacking economies of scale to sell advertisements, many smaller sites had to close or tried to sell themselves to larger competitors. Even Tencent’s classified site did not survive. Today, Ganji and 58.com are China’s largest classified sites. Together they might have over 70% of the market.

In fact, Tencent’s key advantage is its huge QQ user base (over 600 million register users). This allows Tencent to promote its other services very effectively and at a low cost. But if its service quality is not as good as its competitors’, users will not choose to use Tencent’s services.

In conclusion, I believe in a particular sector, if there are one or two very strong players, Tencent probably cannot dominate the sector. But if the sector is quite fragmented, Tencent can probably dominate it, with a few trials. For example, online game. There are over 10 listed online game companies in China. With a few years of hard work, Tencent finally became the largest one, with 2 major blockbusters, Crossfire and Dungeon and Fighter.

Link to full article

Read More

Merry Christmas/Happy New Year 2011

Wishing all our readers merry Christmas and a a fun filled 2011. Take a break from regular life, meet friends, shop. Have fun.

Also, this is the time of the year when you look back (read our 2010 review) on your achievement/milestones and plan for the next year.

At Pluggd.in, we recently collected feedback from our readers and working on features that we believe will add tremendous value to our readers [details next year].

Again, wishing you all happy holidays. Enjoy the sunshine.

Team Pluggd.in.

Link to full article

Read More

Wikileaks And Santa [PI Cartoons]

Dear Friends of Sid – Merry X’Mas!

Link to full article

Read More

Camera360, Could be Much Better Than Instagram

In a post we said the mobile business is not just about location, and the camera (pictures) and contact list are also the golden mine waiting for us to explore. We have seen a few cool applications coming into the market, Instagram is the one playing with pictures and Kik is fantastic idea taking advantage of contact lists on your phone. Instagram comes with some cool effects filters which can transform the look and feel of your pictures then you can share it with your friends, which ‘sounds’ quite simple idea (although technically speaking, it’s actually not). But when every time when I take photos with my phone I always want to use Instagram to try cool effect, I realize Instagram has such a potential. Camera360, developed by a Chengdu-based startup PinGuo Digital Entertainment, is also a brilliant mobile application focusing on photos.

In a visit to Chengdu, I met with Xu Hao, the co-founder of Camera360 and had a pleasant conversation about his product.

The Product

Camera360, the Android application was first published in private beta in April 2010. It only took 3 month for Camera360 to reach 250,000 downloads on Google Android market and it now has over 1millions users across the world. Camera360 provides powerful functions for photo filtering (30 different shooting effect). By now, it comes with 6 shooting modes: Effect Mode, Scenery Mode, Funny Mode, Tilt-shift Mode, Color-shift Mode and Normal Mode, and each mode contains different effects. You can even set the related parameters to customize the effect.

I am playing with Camera360 for a couple of days. It’s such a cool application in terms of the functionality, usability and photo-processing efficiency. The best part I love it is that it takes 1-2 seconds only for processing and display the filtered photo, once you touch the screen you can see the original photo for comparison. Superb!

The Founder

Xu Hao, co-founder of Camera360, is that kind of guy who is not just smart geek but also has the DNA of entrepreneurship. Xu decided to not continue his student life right after graduated from high school and first joined a local IT newspaper publisher as a junior editor. His job was to create the html-version of the newspaper. He found most of time the job is just to copy & paste and is quite time-consuming, so he developed a software which can do the job in batch. It did not take long till he quit the job and started his first company, a photo and video editing studio. “There were several local celebrities who were actually my customers several years ago.” Xu smiled. The second business he opened with his partners was a wedding studio where he developed a program for better editing wedding photos. He then spent lots of time on image processing until Februray 2010 he see the potential of mobile market. “People always asked me why I developed Camera360. For me actually it’s quite natural. I’ve been working on image processing for almost 10 years, so the only thing I can do and am confident with on mobile is image-processing.” Xu said. “I am a fan of Google, so I chose Android. I bought a book about Android Programming in February, and one month later I had the first demo.”

The Future Plan

Unlike other mobile application development team, as Camera360 team has a very strong background and convincing technology on image-processing, it is facing less competition. The company has raised its first round fund from a famous venture capital, so I am asking Xu for his future plan. “We are working on the iPhone version which will be released soon. And the next version of Camera360 will be added more Sharing features, the we are planning some social features too.” Xu told me.

I guess we might see an Instagram-like application with more powerful and interesting image filtering features soon.

Link to full article

Read More

Undercover Cops Dispatched To 1,500 Cellphone Shops To Check If They Explain Kids Filtering Service

Jiji reported [J] that Japan’s National Police Agency is planning to send secret agents to 1,500 cellphone shops nationwide, to check if shop clerks ask a customer who will use the cellphone, and if s/he says it is for their children, then if they introduce kids filtering service and explain what bad things could happen without it.

The National Police Agency tells that it is to enforce “Act on Establishment of Enhanced Environment for Youth’s Safe and Secure Internet Use”, which commenced on April 1st, 2009 in Japan.The act requires cellphone carriers to set on the filtering for users less than 18 yo, but the Cabinet Office research says only 48.2% of children aged between 10 and 17 are using it.

Major Japanese mobile websites form self-regulating organization EMA(Content Evaluation and Monitoring Association) and EMA accredited members services as wholesome sites, which can be reached over the kids filter (some of the services are partially approved by excluding communication feature like forums). Small services by start-ups who do not have enough money to join EMA and foreign services like Twitter/Facebook are blocked by the filter.

Recently, the Ministry of Internal Affair sent inquiry [J] to Apple Japan not having kids filter by default. Japan’s exclusive iPhone distributor Softbank Mobile explains that it needs to get an personal ID on Apple’s website to turn it on, so they cannot force the purchaser to use the filtering app.

See Also:

“Act on Secure and Safe Internet Use Environment for the Youth” site [J] on the Cabinet Office

How much it costs to be examined by EMA [J]

Link to full article

Read More

Want To Share Only With One In Your Social Network – Use Iddhis

How many times have you wanted to share those secret pics with just one friend? Or wanted to write a status update that you wanted only that one special friend to read? Unfortunately none of your social networking sites let you do that.

Iddhis is a social platform that connects you with just one person. An ideal tool for one to connect to a friend or spouse or parents, one at a time and start sharing updates, photos, videos, day’s summary and much more. Updating on Iddhis can be done by web or by sending email to post<at>iddhis.com.

Iddhis.com is build around keeping user’s privacy at top priority. Iddhis.com is a kind of reverse social network, while on social network everything is by default public, on Iddhis.com , everything is private. With an Iddhis.com account one can connect with exactly one person. Social networks are not the ideal way to communicate with someone who is very important to you. That’s where Iddhis comes in.

The team has worked on the UI with a very ajaxy feel to it and making the actions most intuitive. The one basic question lies as to why can’t all this be done over email? Here’s what the founder has to say:

In one word the answer to your question would be  - Motivation. While everything can be done on email, the motivation to actually update on email doesn’t just happen naturally. Iddhis does a lots of things other than being a private space for two close people. There are various categories of updates, like short updates, day’ Summary, complaint, poems, photos, which one may not share on email regularly. Also there is too much noise in the mail box and conversations lose their importance very quickly. In Iddhis, everything remains very fresh as it’s just two of you who would share.

It’s true that everything is a subset of email, from social networking to forums, yet the need of dedicated platform for one particular task is always needed.

Motivation is the right word but does Iddhis solve the issue? Would you adopt to one more platform for that special person you want to interact with?

Do give Iddhis a try and lets know if the team has cracked it.

Link to full article

Read More