SingTel Innov8 funds US-based Baynote

Baynote, a digital marketing solution provider, announced recently a Series C funding round of US$13 million led by SingTel Innov8.

This is the second investment made by SingTel’s US$150 million venture arm, coming just days after leading a Series A round in Singapore start-up 2359 Media.

Earlier Baynote investors, including Hummer Winblad, Steamboat Ventures and JK&B Capital also participated in this round.

While the exact amount of funding by Innov8 remains undisclosed, this investment shows that Innov8 is not restricting itself to investments in Singapore or Asia.

In a statement released by Baynote, the company’s founder Jack Jia said, “Through SingTel Innov8’s investment, we hope to tap into the SingTel Group’s expansive markets and capabilities to help take Baynote and our technology for digital and e-commerce professionals to the next level.”

Baynote also recently appointed SAP executive Doug Merritt as chief executive.

Baynote provides personalization and digital marketing solutions for companies. Its clients include AT&T, Dell and Expedia and they have offices in UK and Germany.

Innov8′s CEO Yvonne Kwek said in a release, “We believe Baynote’s thought leadership around the adaptive web and its disruptive collective intelligence technology for digital marketers and merchandisers will continue to fuel the company’s growth in an area which is becoming more important for enhancing customer experience.”

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Virtual Economy During Oshogatsu (Japanese New Year) In Ameba Pigg

In Japan, New Year’s Eve and the New Year holidays are the biggest events of the year, and it is similar in virtual worlds.
CygerAgent‘s virtual world “Ameba Pigg [J]” sold a lot of virtual goods on the end of the year and the beginning of the year.

The Japanese eat “Toshikoshi-soba” on New Year’s Eve (soba are thin Japanese noodles made from buckwheat).

CyberAgent sold 150,000 virtual goods of this Toshikoshi-soba in Ameba Pigg. However, this doesn’t translate to profit for CyberAgent because these goods were paid for with free virtual currency.

On the other hand, the profit they received from Fukubukoro sales this year is awesome!

Fukubukuro are surprise bags sold by department stores and other places in Japan (the bags are sealed, and buyers don’t know what they will get). Sold at a steep discount, Japanese people love purchasing Fukubukoro on New Year.

CygerAgent started offering 2,011 limited edition virtual Fukubukuro in Ameba Pigg on New Year, filled with items for femal avatars only. However, all virtual Fukubukuro were sold out in a few hours on January 1.

The company charged 2,011 yen for each Fukubukoro, meaning it made:

2,011×2,011=4,044,121 yen (about 48,000 USD)

It looks like the profit you get from virtual Fukubukoro can be compared with real Fukubukuro.

In addition, 18 kinds of Oshogatsu (Japanese New Year)-themed virtual goods were very popular, too.

These Oshogatsu virtual goods were sold about 480,000 times between December 31, 2010 and January 3, 2011.
The most popular item of them was “Kadomatsu”.

“Kadomatsu” is a traditional Japanese decoration used during the New Year. It’s made from bamboo, pine, straw and plum (Japanese people used to decorate every house’s entrance with a Kadomatsu).

Each virtual Kadomatsu was priced at 200 yen, and CyberAgent sold about 16,000 of them!

200×16,000=3,200,000 yen (about 38,000 USD)

These Oshogatsu items are becoming outdated in the real world. However, they are still popular in the virtual world.

According to CyberAgent, about 2.4M users logged in to Ameba Pigg between December 31 and January 3. This number is almost equal to “Hatsumode”, the first Shinto shrine visit of the New Year in the real world.

Ameba Pigg has more than 5 million users currently, 65% of whom are women.

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Why Social Curation is Important for the Online Video Industry

As per comScore Oct 2010 data more than 175 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content for an average of 15.1 hours per viewer (http://bit.ly/ifjfFQ). Social video curation is process where after watching a video the user shares that video with his social network by either posting it on his Facebook wall, Tweeting the video link or embedding the video on his blog etc.

On an average each user has approx 220 friends on Facebook, approx 30 followers on Twitter etc. Each user by the process of social curation creates a large multiplier effect and creates a rich volume of real-time data which could be more useful than the TV rating systems. Now imagine a service that takes this large volume of curated video data and leveraging machine algorithms creates a compelling video discovery experience that mimics broadcast TV but has all the smarts running in the cloud.
The experience (unlike broadcast TV) is personalized and consumers discover videos that people with similar tastes are watching and what is trending in real-time. Services powered by social curation will fundamentally impact the search business and connected devices business. The manner in which they will impact each of the businesses are summarized below:

1.       Impact on share of online minutes of Search: Video creates large amount of online minutes. As per comScore the US user watched 36.5 BN videos and consumed 156 BN minutes in the month of July 2010. Data is already showing that people are spending more online minutes on social networks like Facebook and Twitter than on Google.
With social curation of videos the consumer is more likely to discover videos in his Facebook News Feed or in his Twitter feed rather than searching for it. As per TubeMogul research referral traffic for online video from Facebook and Twitter is growing faster than search engines http://bit.ly/9WkMQw. The problem in past has been that social networks like Facebook, twitter etc have not created a rich consumption experience across devices like touch enabled tablet, 10 ft experience on connected TV or on smart phones.

A services that uses curated video data to create a compelling consumption experience across devices could lead to greater consumption of videos on these services. Hence the consumer would have lower propensity to search. In the future these kind of video discovery services could potentially garner a larger share of online minutes (probably at the expense of search).

2.      Impact on devices: Currently the device manufacturers are taking a fragmented approach to online video. The current approach is to allow content owners to put their apps on the App store/platform of the device manufacturer. The content owners are expected to do most of the heavy lifting in defining the consumer experience and in deployment across different App stores.

With social curation becoming another compelling way to discover videos the user would want a service that helps him consume curated videos from multiple sources all at one place. In the future the device manufacturers (tablet, connected TV, smart phone) could start offering a video discovery service that aggregates curated content from multiple sources and creates a personal experience powered by an individual’s social connections.

The video discovery service would be expected to do most of the work in defining the consumer experience across different devices. Will this video discovery service be owned by the device manufacturer or will it be a 3rd party service is a million dollar question.

The likelihood of this being a 3rd party service which works across different devices and brands is highly likely.

What’s your take?

[Guest article written by Rajnish, cofounder of Shufflr.tv. Reproduced from Rajnish's blog.]

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See Nokia, Android is an Aspirational Brand in India [Bihar Government to Use 'Android' Phones]

Bihar Government has decided to use ‘Android’ phones to monitor road construction from district headquarters.

In the first phase, the phones would be given to eight executive/assistant engineers for inspection of three state highways — 68, 69 and 70 — in Naxal-hit Gaya and Aurangabad, which are being constructed or augmented with an Asian Development Bank (ADB) loan.

The usage is very simple- an executive engineer will visit construction sites every two days to take pictures of under-construction roads and upload them on the RCD site (Bihar State Road Development Corporation). Photos taken using these phones would verify that the pictures have actually been taken at the site of the construction work.
To ensure double-compliance, the RCD Secretary will monitor the location of the engineers using Google Maps, another application available on the phone. Once this pilot is successful, the government will give 200 Android phones to its engineers.[HT]

Question: When was the last time you saw a government talking/publicizing their usage of an OS brand, say “Symbian” [which too is open sourced]. You don’t buy an OS brand, you buy the packaged deal. But the fact that government chose to talk about Android signifies what Android means to a non-geeky population.

If you notice, all of the above requirements (good camera + Google maps+ GPS) can be easily met with any smartphone (basic Nokia smartphone can do it too). The government could have announced using Android based devices like Samsung etc, but it probably won’t make news – as much as using an Android device did.

So Android – you are an aspirational brand among Indians (by the way, Micromax is foraying aggresively into Android devices).

What’s your take?

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Ecommerce Startup, LetsBuy Raises $6 million Funding

ECommerce is a growth category in Indian online space and Indians are getting comfortable with buying branded products online. 

LetsBuy.com, a startup by Hitesh Dhingra (earlier cofounder of Tyroo and also runs CafeGadets.in) has raised $6 million from Helion Venture Partners, Accel Partners & Tiger Global.

Launched in 2009, New Delhi based LetsBuy is  an online retailer of consumer electronics, communications and computer goods from the leading brands in the categories and maintains complete control of the product-delivery logistics, ensuring shorter delivery time.

What’s interesting is that Accel also invested in Flipkart, which too is expanding into consumer electronics category (i.e. LetsBuy competitor).

Accel Partners and Helion Ventures recently invested $2.8 million in Exclusively.in, an ecommerce venture targeted towards US market.

Is ECommerce the next big thing or we are witnessing a herd story here? 

Do take our Survey to Understand Your Ecommerce Behavior (if you share your email id, you will get a copy of the report).

Recommended Read: ecommerce in India – The Misunderstood Indian Internet User

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Spotted: Intuit’s Money Manager Goes Live for ICICI Accounts

Intuit is taking a B2B route in India and while the entry strategy was to partner with Moneycontrol, the company is taking the most logical step, i.e. integrate MoneyManager with India’s largest largest private bank, i.e. ICICI.

When you login to your ICICI Bank account, you will now notice the “Go to Money Manager” link on the right. You can integrate all your accounts (Savings/Credit/Fixed Deposit) in Money Manager, which now offers 90 day free trial.

Intuit money manager for India (website) is money manager plus budget planner that supports investment tracking and spend categorization.

A Look at Personal Finance Products

Typically, personal finance companies fall under following categories:

• Manual – companies like trackspends fall under this category.
• Screen Scraping (Arthamoney does this).
• Bank Integration – Very few companies claim to do this.

ICICI’s MoneyManager currently works only for ICICI bank accounts, while Moneycontrol lets you link accounts from other banks as well.

Now that Intuit has made the first mega move (i.e. bundling), it will be interesting to see how others react to this (there are close to 5 startups operating in personal finance tracking space).

An interesting space to watch out for. Tell us how do you track your personal finance/spend?

Startups in this space: TrackSpends (lets you track your Expense Via SMS), OnYeM, TrackEveryCoin, Perfios (raised Series A), PaisaGate, Beezang.

Recommended Read: 5 personal finance mistakes that first time entrepreneurs must avoid

[Hat Tip: Yogesh R]

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Is Traffic On TechCrunch Moving Away? [Readership Wobble]

We know that earth does wobble. Occasionally it also undergoes polarity reversals. But such events are rare. What is more common is the rise and fall of Internet giants. Common is panic, finger-pointing and lawsuits. Common is plummeting traffic and management ousters. It happened to Altavista, it happened to Myspace, it happened to Yahoo and it might happen to Google too. But Techcrunch? Never thought that it could happen to TC, did you?

No way there doesn’t seem any good reason for us to think that TC would fall off the precipice anytime soon. That tech readers would move away from it is, DEFINITELY IS, a far flung imagination. Except for the effect that AOL (and its IE loving readers) has on TC community, or may be too many Apple love posts is finally taking a toll on TC’s readership. Or may be there was genuine disliking for Paul Carr’s anti-Assange essays, who knows?

Techcrunch is wobbling these days. I got to be kidding you, but Alexa does not lie.

There is a clear sharp fall in traffic in the last couple of weeks. What is more interesting is that the dip is happening after the new year holidays are over and every other website seems to be picking up the numbers. It could so happen that TC community is off for longer holiday on Tahiti, coz you know CEO & VCs generally have lots of fun. But hey did you observe that Engagdet faced such a dip in traffic last month and they bought ad space too?

And this is what Michael Arrington got to say about it. “One thing big blogs don’t do is buy traffic to juice up the Comscore numbers. It’s an unspoken rule. It’s cheating, and it brings in bad traffic that doesn’t stick around or come back for the most part (or so we assume).

So we’re sad to see our sister blog Engadget doing just that – buying ads to pump up their Comscore rankings. We’ve seen a ridiculous number of ads on Google over the last month or two saying things like “Keep Up With What’s Going On In The Tech World With News From Engadget.”

And here, that‘s how Engadget fairs on Alexa:

Engadget did resort to buying ad space to spruce up its number but Techcrunch, by looking at its recent post on Engadget, will probably not do it.

So the question is are people ultimately choosing to move away from Techcrunch? If so, what could be the reason for it? Is AOL aura (common between Engadget and Techcrunch) a reason behind the fall or the writing quality is deteriorating? My opinion – AOL.

What’s your take?

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