China Mobile Is To Implement Dynamic Cell-ID, LBS Services Need Pay for the Location

“It’s no longer a question of ‘to do or not to do’, China Mobile will implement the dynamic Cell-ID technology sooner or later. ” a friend said this to me, “the solution is there, and it’s just a matter of time because deploying it to the entire network may take a long time.” The reason, China Mobile is not happy that more and more LBS services ‘steal’ its cell location data.

The background – where does the location data come from?

Where does the location data come from? You may say GPS. Fair enough, GPS can give you accurate location (longitude/latitude). But how many mobile phones have GPS chips? All latest smart phones have it, but still it’s a small percentage. It’s the trend to have GPS on the phone, but it may take years (especially in China where many local brands and Shanzhai phones are quite popular). So for majority of phones which have no GPS powered, how to get the location? and the second issue is that GPS needs outdoor environment for better signal, i.e. if LBS services only rely on that, you have to tell your users not to use it inside the building, restaurant, hotel etc.

So we need other solutions. Since the mobile phone is always connected with base stations, so basically, if we know which base stations you are connected (i.e. which cell you are in), as we know the location of each base stations, we can somehow roughly calculate the locations (ref, A-GPS). The location acquired by this way may not be as accurate as GPS gives us, but it is ok to use for most of cases.

Then question comes down to: who has the location of the base stations. Well, it’s an easy question, of course, the operators, and in China, the biggest guy has the best network coverage is: China Mobile.

Why China Mobile is NOT happy?

Once you have the ID of the cell, by looking up in a database, you can get the location. “Currently, many LBS service would say they have the right to use the locations as they bought that database from third parties” my friend said, “but the issue is China Mobile never said its cell-location database is to sell!!” Alternatively, the database can be populated by crowdsourcing, Google seems doing this. But it needs huge resources and large user base. “But for those Chinese third-parties, they do not have it. ” he said. And it’s also true that Google is still in a bit trouble with the mapping license in China.

Anyway, the current situation is actually none of LBS services pay China Mobile for its own property, the location data.

Why Dynamic Cell-ID?

Dynamic Cell-ID is a way of dynamically assigning the Cell-ID that is reported to wireless devices by base stations.  Rather than always reporting the same Cell ID, base stations report a different, dynamically generated Cell-ID. So, only the operator can map the dynamic Cell-ID to the fixed Cell-ID that is required to get the location (via this). In other words, if China Mobile (and later China Unicom, China Telecom) has this implemented, the LBS services have to pay the operators directly for the access.

If what I wrote down makes sense, then unfortunately, all LBS dreams still can not get around the operators until one day GPS phones can dominate the market.

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Save the date for Echelon 2011

Echelon is back for 2011. We’re making it bigger and better this year, with an expanded Startup Launchpad, a new venue, and satellite events in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.

Echelon 2011 is happening on June 10 and 11 at the University Cultural Centre at the National University of Singapore.

Last year was a big year for Asia’s startup scene, but we have a feeling 2011 is going to be huge. You’ll see the hottest startups at our event. More details at the echelon 2011 page, and we’ll fill it in as we go along.

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Slideshare to Launch Webinar Service?

Today, while embedding a slideshare presentation, I noticed that slideshare is passing an anchor link of ‘Webinars’ to slideshare website.

slideshare webinar

Generally speaking, anchor linking is a strategy adopted to increase the overall rank of the website vis-a-vis keyword and is a good GTM (Go To Market) strategy.

Continuing with their PRO services, Slideshare’s dedicated webinar service (if true) will enable companies/individuals to control the presentation running on other’ computers – and make it more interactive (two way communication/ real time discussions) betwen presenter and the audience as opposed to a plain slidecast.

If not, why would Slideshare go after a keyword that doesn’t matches its offering?

Update: I just had a word with Amit and he mentioned that this isn’t in the near term roadmap.

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What’s Common Between Rock Bands and Startups ?

Do you see any similarity between the life of a band and that of a start-up? Is there a correlation between bands & the bandits?

Yes, there is apart from the rough rides that both undertake.

If you watch the startups closely, the ones with say two to three co-founders, you’ll find that they are more like a rock band than anything else.You simply won’t get the right kind of music from the thing, without that synergy, sync and will to perform with each other.

While for a solopreneur, like the one behind this website, the situation is closer to that of – eww – a pop star! I mean not quite so much for Pluggd.in, but do you get the point? The risk, the trade offs and the rate of emotional erosion is much higher for a soloist. And well being pop soloist, does have higher rewards to make up for lower probability of being successful.

Anyway, I researched a little more than that. Both startups and bands have a lot of troubles in common. No money, no product, no sales, no visibility and worst of all – no process. Fortunately though, startups have a few templates and tools called business plan, TAM, SAM, SOM to figure out a path. Bands, at least those in India, don’t have even that. And these common challenges only reinforce the need for team entrepreneurs – i.e a technology band - to stick together. Startups are like an amateur band trying to play the tune for the early adopters, perhaps even masses, who want to relish a well packaged  and meaningful piece of music. Probably pay for it. But endurance of success and pain together is what makes the band worth its salt.

Let me share the story of Pink Floyd over here. In 1965 co-founders (not just musicians, you see) Syd Barret, Nick Mason, Richard Wright, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, each having a flair for philosophical compositions started a band called The Pink Floyd Sound. Later on, once their core sound (product), rather a new sound was ready, they dropped ‘The’  (Oops! Facebook only repeated this) from their name and called themselves Pink Floyd. Psychedelic Rock was their niche to be.

Pink Floyd

View more webinars from Marvin Danig.

Pink Floyd’s journey was not any different from Facebook. Numerous lawsuits, forced exits, leadership changes, rights removal, ego clashes and power-struggle marked its own time-line.

Like a startup they started with zero visibility, little money often changing their name & music. But finally after a lot of experimentation they did strike the right chord with people. And when they did, Pink Floyd only got bigger to achieve the ‘father of rock’ status. A bloody hockey-stick growth, you see.

It was ‘team work’ that did them good. Over time they got a perfect amalgam of great music, great lyrics and execution from each other. I mean how much do lyrics from Waters, guitar leads from Gilmour, operatic keyboards from Richard Wright or crazy percussion from Nick Mason penetrate the music market when the band isn’t play together? Those who have heard anthems like Another brick in the wall, Coming back to life, High hopes, Run like hell, Comfortably numb, Learning to fly will surely understand what these products mean to ardent rock listeners.

It is pertinent to reiterate that each band member came up with an independent album; but none got any close to creating history in rock music like Pink Floyd did. Team spirit is what kept them ticking.

Don’t you agree? How important is your team for you? Leave your thoughts rockers.

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Group Buying Is 95% Offline Business, Said uBuyiBuy, the Groupon HongKong

uBuyiBuy is the leading HongKong-based group buying service. In November 2010, it’s acquired by Groupon and officially became the Groupon HongKong. (read our Groupon Taiwan interview.) It’s a great pleasure for me to talk with Danny Yeung, the founder of uBuyiBuy who shared his experience and opinion on the Group Buying market.

1. the founder, the company and the business

Unlike Groupon Taiwan founders who are involved with web market for a few years, Danny is actually a new comer. Before he launched uBuyiBuy, he was doing hotel furniture import/export business in U.S. Danny starts thinking of the idea of group buying business in January 2010, then in March he flew back to HongKong and set up the team. on 28th June, uBuyiBuy had the first deal out.

So why HongKong, I asked Danny. He thinks although HongKong market is small, it is the hub of Asia business and there are lots of diverse business/service and perfect consumer base suitable for Group buying business. Most of deals on uBuyiBuy are about food, beauty salon, movie theater etc. ‘Our first deal is a HK$99 voucher for a Hairy Salon, and we managed to sell around 400 which is quite encouraging for us.’, Danny said.

2. the Group Buying business in HK, and how uBuyiBuy stands out?

Danny said there were around 30 groupon copies currently running in HK. uBuyiBuy is actually the second one launched in HK. (Gigonzone is the first one). But now, uBuyiBuy is obviously the No.1 player with 300,000 email subscription, 160,000 fans on Facebook, and it’s even one of top 5 sites in HK in terms of users/traffic. So I asked Danny how uBuyiBuy could stand out in such a short time. ‘It’s all about execution. We are not first so can we can learn from first one and think how wfe can do it better and faster.’ Danny said. Atlaspost (Groupon Taiwan) spent 3 years on a mobile social network market where it got the >1million users, but uBuyiBuy started from zero, ‘We spent a lot of time/effort promoting us using Facebook which brings us the users’, Danny told me.

3. what will uBuyiBuy focus on? the opinion about groupon in future?

Danny said, ‘We are learning from Groupon U.S. which is also sharing their technology and solutions to improve uBuyiBuy’s business in HK. For new future of Groupon, I think we will focus more on multiple deals per day and uBuyiBuy version of Groupon mobile application will be launched in the first quater of 2011.’

I was also asking about how to guarantee the quality of service which causes lots of complains on Group buying model. Danny said they had a complicated procedure to verify each potential deal, e.g. his team would do the research in advance to gather the information, user feedback etc from the net for reference. ‘We reject around 70% of the deals daily’, Danny said.

4. what’s the most difficult part running the group buying business, and how’s the Chinese groupon market

‘Talking to the right person from merchant. Group buying, in some sense is about Social Media. ‘ Danny think, ‘if they have some ideas about social media, the deal can be done much easier. If not, it could be totally wasting of time.’

Danny thinks in 6 months, most of Groupon sites will be down but he also agrees that the Chinese group buying market might be different as it has a such massive market in general and you might survive if focus on niche market or certain region.

5. HK startup environment in general

uBuyiBuy is actually the 2nd company I know acquired by U.S company. The first one is EditGrid which is bought by Apple. ‘The acquisition of uBuyiBuy by Groupon might bring more hope for HongKong-based entrepreneurs as they see a new possible exit for startups. ‘ Danny believe so.

I said to Danny, maybe the experience from your previous business does help a lot on your running uBuyiBuy. And Danny agreed on that. ‘Group buying business, in my opinion is 95% offline business and 5% online business.’ Danny commented.

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Chinese leading Ad network AdChina looking into mobile space

Shanghai based AdChina runs the largest online Ad network in China.  Industry expert estimated it has about 50% of the market share.   As mobile internet becoming more mature, it is also entering the mobile space.  Recently,  it have allowed its advertisers to put their ads on mobile websites, via its network.

This puts it into direct competition with Shanghai based Madhouse, which runs the leading mobile ad network at the moment.  Madhouse covers most of the leading WAP sites in China and it has a exclusive deal with Kongzhong as its advertising agent.

Madhouse also covers most of the mobile internet users in China.  When I visited Madhouse in August, CEO Joshua Maa said, their network covered 145 million mobile internet users in China.  At that time, total mobile users in China is only 233 million.  That means they covered over 60% of mobile internet population in China.

It would be interesting to see how AdChina is going to battle with such as strong competitor.

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Lenovo is going to launch iPad like tablet

When Apple’s iPad launched last year, sales went wild within a month.  Since then, many computer manufacturers launched their version of iPad like device.

China’s leading computer maker, Lenovo, is not going to miss the party.  It is also going to launch its iPad like tablet.  The device looks and feels like iPad, but it is Android inside.  It has a larger and better screen.  And it is going to be a bit cheaper than iPad.  The list price is about US$ 520.

The device supports Wifi and 3G.  Both WSCMA and CDMA 2000 3G standards are supported .  But not TD-SCDMA.  Reason: Android has not built the necessary module to support TD yet.  And it is too difficult for Lenovo to do that itself.

It seems only China Telecom and China Unicom users can enjoy the devices.  Too bad for China Mobile.

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Lenovo Ideapad Slite unveiled, runs Windows 7

The world’s biggest gadget show event CES is just tow days ahead now, but Lenovo obviously is not going to wrap all its news stuff with back cloth just for the coming big show. In contrary, they’ve showed a handful of new notebooks and its LePad. Today they unveiled another tablet which is called Ideapad Slite.

A little less than two weeks ago we ever reported Lenovo LePad’s Chinese microblog showed tow pictures in which a tablet was caught running Windows 7. At that time we thought it’s LePad. Now things became clear, it’s Ideapad Slite.

Except this set of pictures, Lenovo didn’t tell any more. We only know that Ideapad Slite will runs Windows 7. So for more details we still wait for CES 2011.

[Source: zol]

• Lenovo LePad running Windows 7,revealed on its official microblog
• Lenovo S800 gets a transparent color display
• Lenovo Lephone clone surfaces in Shenzhen
• Lenovo LePhone hands-on Video
• Lenovo ideapad Z460 notebook unveiled
• Lenovo ideapad Y460 shipped in China
• Lenovo IdeaCentre A305 All-In-One PC
• Lenovo ideapad Y460 spotted, got disassembled
• Lenovo G455A AMD-based notebook launched in China
• Lenovo denies launching Tianji IBook EB-605 ebook reader

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Lion Introduces Restroom Finder For Students To Have Exams W/O Worrying About Diarrhea

In the days from January to March, it is very hard time for high school graduates and prep-school students because of taking entrance exams for universities/colleges of their choices.   They are always nervous.  Not a few of the students suffer from diarrhea before the exams.  Poor thing.

Lion Corporation, a 220 year-old sanitary and pharmaceutical manufacturer based in Tokyo, has introduced the iPhone app that allows you to find a nearest restroom at the exam venues whenever you want to take a shit.   This is a promotion of their medicine for diarrhea.

The iPhone app, which is named @Toilet College, shows you a location map of restrooms by entering the name of college/university or by the GPS detecting and helps you concentrate on the exams.   Furthermore, the company set up a virtual shrine for praying for preventing diarrhea[J] on the promotion website. Students will leave many posts for their luck for passing exams without experiencing diarrhea during the time, and those posts will be delivered to a real shrine in Kyoto that has been known for having the god of curing stomachaches.

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CES 2011–Saankhya Labs Develops World’s First Universal TV demodulator

Bangalore based Saankhya Labs is a fabless semiconductor startup that has developed world’s first Software-Defined Universal Demodulator IC for Digital and Analog TV reception.

The transition from Analog to Digital transmission of TV signals is becoming a reality in most countries across the world. This is leading to proliferation of DTV receivers. Viewers today receive DTV content through Digital TVs (DTV), Set-top-boxes, PC-TV tuners and Cell phones. DTV signals are transmitted over Terrestrial, Cable and Satellite media.

“TV broadcast standards are region-specific. In North America/Korea terrestrial DTV is based on ATSC, Europe/India/many parts of Asia use DVB-T, Japan/ Brazil use ISDB-T and China uses CDMB-T. Similar diversity exists in Mobile TV, Cable and Satellite standards as well. Most DTV/PC-TV/Mobile-TV manufacturers today cater to the world market through region-specific products. This leads to additional design, manufacturing and inventory costs due to separate product lines for each region. DTV sets in each region have to support terrestrial, cable and sometime satellite reception. Analog TV transmission will continue to exist in many parts of the world requiring demodulation support. This requires two or three demodulator chips on the DTV chassis, leading to high cost. The scarcity of spectrum is driving the proliferation of more TV standards. Saankhya’s solutions solve this problem in a unique way. Our solution decreases the cost of a regional TV set as well as the cost of manufacturing a world TV receiver.”[source]

The startup has developed multi-standard TV demodulation technology targeted for Digital TV and PC TV Tuner applications. Saankhya’s technology enables a universal TV demodulator, capable of demodulating all digital and analog TV signals on a single chip. The solution is capable of performing the functions of Signal Conditioning, Signal Processing and Channel Decoding stages to generate a Transport Stream.

Traditionally ICs have been typically implemented as hardwired architectures due to the inherent compute complexity of the tasks and disadvantage to this is inflexibility, higher recurring cost and limited reuse.

What Saankhya offers is an ASSP (Application Specific Signal Processor) for demodulation and is designed to demodulate all the broadcast TV standards.

The features of the platform are:

• Scalability: The combination of a control processor, VLIW based processing clusters constitutes a scalable, high performance, power-efficient platform. The framework of the platform allows each processing cluster to be scaled based on standard specific data rates. This ability also enables us to support wide range of data rates (Cable, Terrestrial). In future this platform will be capable of accommodating emerging DTV standards like DVBT2 and Enhanced VSB for ATSC.
• Flexibility/Ease of Re-use: The platform enables us to meet performance of all supported standards, by re-using the available MIPS and memory within each of the signal processing clusters. The flexibility of a programmable platform allows us to perform innovative load-balancing.

The company will demo its product at CES 2011 and we hope they catch the eyes of TV manufacturers.

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Largest, Biggest and First – The Abusive Marketing Statements Startups Shouldn’t Use

Everyday we receive emails from newly found startup (and in some cases,ideas) claiming themselves to be either first or largest (in their category).

Few startups call a feature as first of its kind (Yay! You can send messages in Marathi in our matrimony portal. This is first of its kind!)

To me, these are the most abusive statements one can ever use while promoting his/her venture – especially to a site like us (though I think it surely works for media, at least Ankit Fadia has proved it).

If you claim yourself to be first, you probably haven’t done enough of market research, you surely haven’t spent enough time researching your business category.

If you claim yourself to be largest, you simply do not know the size of your competition.

Having said above, I am not suggesting startups to go less aggressive in marketing – but know whom you are talking to. Few startups, in their business plan add ‘India’s First <XYZ>’ , assuming investors overlook such ass-umptions.

Don’t do that, instead try some Guerrilla Marketing tips for Startups.

What’s important to understand here is what works for certain audience/communities – Media loves made-up stories (we loathe it). We love product stories. US bloggers love global stories. US media loves Indian stories with BoP/Rural touch.

Customize your marketing strategy according to the target group. A bit of honesty works, though smart messaging increases your chance of getting noticed. There will be a time in the life of your company when you have grown to such a size (in terms of market cap) that these “abusive” statements (i.e. Largest, Biggest and First) will come naturally to your marketing department and no one will question you on that.

But that’s in future.

If you are a startup who has revisited the marketing strategy (especially when largest/biggest didn’t work), do share your comments/experience.

Recommended Read: Effective Marketing Tips for Startups & Small Businesses | How to Write a Press Release that *actually* gets noticed

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