Cinemacraft brings TV streaming to mobile devices

Mobile TV hasn’t seen a huge uptake in its adoption rate despite manufacturers such as LG, Samsung and Dell releasing DTV-enabled products. Accessing TV on a mobile phone is often wrought with infrastructural issues such as network connection, mobile phone capability and the content format. Cinemacraft, a Singapore-based startup, is looking at broadcasting channels to mobile phones, albeit in a different way.

Cinemacraft is a platform application that enables the content publishers to broadcast its channels on various handsets. Through its patented compression and video streaming technology, Cinemacraft aims to be a broadcast network for mobile phones. This includes even the low end devices, and now supports 70 GPRS and 300 3G enabled mobile devices.

Cinemacraft was among the top 15 finalists of the Amazon Startup Challenge and is now in the midst of raising Series A funding. It’s a spin off of the Japanese company, Cinema Craft that provides BD/DVD encoding and film restoration product.

We spoke to Sandeep Casi, founder of Cinemacraft to find out more about this product and the markets it’s targetting.

Q: What is Cinemacraft?

Cinemacraft want to be the broadcast network for mobile devices. So what that means is, if you look at Dish Network - we want to be the same in mobile devices. More and more people consume media on mobile devices, but there’s no broadcast network in that. Everybody is going point to point. What we are trying to do is to create a platform in the backend, and the platform allows content makers to come in and put their channels on it and go to market from day one.

Our core competency is that we rebuilt the whole system (media players and backend systems). We’ve built an end to end solution and then people can just put their channels on top of it and open it up to users.

Our technology is proprietary on the front end, on the streaming side. We can actually go to low end mobile device today. We don’t have any competition in that area today. Nobody can stream media at 30 kilo bits per sec. We can.

Q: What markets are you targeting?

Asia is a predominant market for us, because there’s close to 1.3 – 1.6 billion mobile devices and most of these devices are low end devices. For most of these people, mobile devices are the only consumption devices for them. If you look at TV vs mobile devices in India especially, there are 170 million televisions and 800 million mobile devices.

We are entering into Indonesia as of today. We have signed contracts with Indosat (Indonesia), Maxus (Malaysia), PLDT (Philippines) through our partner company. And so in other markets like Vietnam, Bangladesh, India we are in discussions with telcos.

We have deployments in Japan. We just need to extend it. The company is only 6 months old.

Q: How is the mobileTV uptake in Japan?

In Japan, we already have a mobileTV and it’s called 1seg TV and what that means is there is a hardware tuner already on your device. It’s an analog tuner. That’s been around for some time now.

The reason that we think we are different from that is because, the devices that have 1seg are bulky and heavy to carry. Second is the battery life, it consumes much more life and the third reason is that we can enable TV on the devices without being 1seg. Give us an iPhone, Nokia – we can enable television on that. Basically we use HTTP protocol to stream. So any device that can actually talk HTTP can stream TV. All you need is a small footprint about 50 kilobits that you download from a WAP website then you stream through HTTP.

From our perspective, we don’t look at ourselves as the technology players but more in terms of a broadcast service. And what that means is that we own the technology, encoding, the distribution, front end devices and we also in certain cases own the content. In case of Japanes Anime, we have the rights for it on mobile devices.

Q: What’s the revenue model of Cinemacraft?

There are couple of revenue models we are going after. One is a A la-carte, pay per view model, which works in certain situations. Example, for sports. Then there is the secondary model which is the subscription model. You charge them according to the channels they have subscribed to.

Q: How much are you planning on charging?

It depends on market to market. Across the board, we are probably looking at one US dollar a month.

Q: How big is the team?

At this point in time, there are about five people in Tokyo and all of them concentrate on encoding engineering. I have one person in Shanghai and a outsourced about four and the Shanghai team is basically decoding. And the Singapore people with Ashok (vice-president of engineering) coming in, we are looking to hire about five people. And these people will concentrate on the backend system.

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Facebook Credits to be mandatory for social games from July

Facebook has announced that as of July 1, social game developers using the service will be required to adopt Facebook Credits as one of their payment channels. It’s currently being used by at least 350 games from 150 developers.

Despite being in beta for the past several months, Facebook Credits has made up more than 70% of transaction volume on the social networking site. Similar to Apple’s App Store scheme, Facebook developers will keep 70% of the revenue from each transaction while the remainder goes to Facebook. Seems that social networking is yet another industry that Apple’s influence has made a mark on.

According to the announcement, developers who have adopted Facebook Credits as their in-game currency have seen increases in gross revenue and in revenue per user. It claims to also have made games more seamless and enjoyable. According to those who have participated, which include Zynga, DigitalChocolate, PopCap, Playfish, among others, Facebook Credits will do fine — as Qui-Gon Jinn once said.

While developers are free to arrange for other payment channels in addition to Facebook Credits, those who adopt the scheme exclusively will receive special incentives such as, “early access to product features and premium promotion on Facebook, including featured placement on the Games Dashboard, premium targeting for ads, and access to new co-promotion opportunities.”

To qualify for the incentives, Facebook has outlined three criteria:

• Facebook Credits should be the game’s premium currency
• All virtual goods available for purchase with premium currency are priced in Facebook Credits. However, goods can be available through earned currency
• Items are not priced in local currency or another in-game premium currency

Since Facebook has integrated various forms of payments into its system, such credit cards, PayPal, mobile payments, redeemable vouchers and others, it’s therefore more likely for users to adopt Credits. All they need to do is input their details once and they’ll be free to roam through all their games and make the necessary purchases.

Of course, all this means everyone, from kids to parents, will require a much closer scrutiny on what they do on Facebook as financial transactions becomes not much more than a click away.

While currently Credits is open only for games, the opportunity to integrate it with other categories remains wide open and it’s not inconceivable that Facebook will implement Credits for any and all transactions in the future. It may even supplant PayPal as the top online payment method should the platform open up to individuals.

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Orkut Turns 7 – A Look at [Falling] Traffic

Orkut has turned 7 years today and while the social network enjoyed quite a bit of love from emerging markets in the early days, things do not seem to move in Google’s favor after Facebook assault.

The month of August 2010 was when Facebook, for the first time went past Orkut and the gap has widened since then. Take a look at the latest Comscore traffic (UVs)

Orkut vs Facebook Traffic

Sometimes, you gotta pay a hefty price for being slow and boring.

Do you still use Orkut?

Recommended Read: Facebook vs. Orkut: New kid on the block wins and how! |  The Real Reason Behind Facebook’s Growth in India.

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1Malaysia.com: Patriotic social networking

Caso CEO Ezran Baharum. Photo taken from mStar Online.

With little fanfare, 1Malaysia.com – the first made-in-Malaysia social networking service – was launched to the masses on January 12. Despite the closeness of its domain name to 1Malaysia.com.my – which leads to the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s official site – the social network has no direct ties to the Malaysian government, quashing ideas of “Najib is My Friend” t-shirts popping up on Threadless.

Besides pointing out the rather lax domain-name buying policy of the Prime Minister’s department, 1Malaysia.com has little information about who developed the site – not helped by the fact that there isn’t an About Us page. It took us a few Google searches to find out that 1Malaysia.com is an initiative by Malaysian company Caso Sdn Bhd, which is led by its 27-year-old CEO Ezran Baharum.

According to an interview with mStar, the Malay-language section of Malaysian newspaper The Star, Baharum said that he created 1Malaysia.com as an alternative to Facebook, should it ever close down. “Rumours that Facebook would close down have been going on forever and that is not an impossibility,” he said, adding that businesses and musicians that depend solely on Facebook would then have to find alternatives to attract customers and fans.

Though it launched officially in January 2011, work on the social networking site has started since 2008, said Caso’s technical chief Tan Yew Hong.

“We’ve been working on the website since 2008 but that has nothing to do with rumours of Facebook closing down. We didn’t know about those rumours. It was purely coincidental,” Tan said in the same story.

“We employed a ‘feel like home’ concept for the website and I’m confident it will be well received by the Malaysian public and even the world,” Tan said, adding that the site runs on eight servers based in Malaysia.

Currently there are more than 12,000 members signed up to the social networking site. A brief look through the site reveals a rudimentary Facebook-like interface mixed with user-posted listings of blogs, groups, and videos.

Update: We wanted to give you a better look into the service, but 1Malaysia.com is experiencing the fail whale at the time of writing.

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Facebook Movie “The Social Network” Tops At Its Second Week

It is a slow-starter. The Facebook-themed movie “The Social Network”, which was defeated by Japanese movie “Boku to Tsuma no 1778 no Monogatari” at its release weekend reportedly won the ranking top on January 22-23 weekend (by Kogyo Tsushinsha).

1. The Social Network
2. Boku to Tsuma no 1778 no Monogatari (Stories Of Me And My Wife)
3. Tensou Sentai Goseiger vs Shinkenger Epic on Ginmaku
4. Aibo The Movie II
5. Unstoppable
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
7. Space Battleship Yamato
8. Inu to Anata no Monogatari. Inu no Eiga (A Story of You and Your Dog. The Dog Movie)
9. Inazuma Eleven The Movie

Japanese ranking watcher bloggers say that the news of its getting the Golden Globe awards made a good effect. Japanese media has been picking up both the movie and the Facebook a lot more this month, too.

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iPhone App To Experience Japanese Bad Boys Rite Of Passage, Tobacco Burn

photo by

Macotakara [J]

Konjoyaki by Studio Moriken [J] is a free iPhone application lets you go through Japanese Yankee culture. “Yankee” here does not means Northern American, in Japanese it means “bad boys”. Konjoyaki, literally means “Burn with guts”, is a popular form of initiation among Yakuza-wannabe high school students. You show your courage by sticking burning cigarette on yourself and your comrades. On the app, you may keep touching displayed fingers. The longer you press, the darker marks are burnt. via MacOtakara [J]

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An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Loss, Provident Fund and Lessons Learnt

I recently met a senior executive with a MNC who was contemplating leaving to either start his own company or join a startup. He has over 25years experience, is a respected and recognized technologist with several published articles and books to his credit; he has built several solid technical teams in his various avatars through the years. He had also started his own technology company about 10years ago. The company had to shut down after 2.5 yrs. “I took the decision to shut down the company after a meeting with an official of the Provident Fund authority.

what makes a successful entrepreneur?

The company had not remitted PF on account of its employees though it was making some revenues. I was using cash-inflows to part pay salaries to employees that took care of the immediate situation than to worry about a future pay-out like PF. These employees had been with me at little or no salary for close to 18 months and I just couldn’t let that situation continue.

However, the official made me aware of the serious consequences of this lapse (which included my going to jail!) and was advised to somehow find the money, square off the PF account and then proceed to shut down the company. I was in a state of shock”.“The company owed money to lot of people and I was personally in debt. It was a very hard decision for me but I managed to find the Rs 2 lakhs required for the PF payments and then proceeded to shut down the company. It was a terrible experience”.

“I should have taken the $500K that a VC, who knew and respected me, had offered in the early days of my company. My business partner advised me against taking the money as he hadn’t had a happy experience with this VC. I depended a lot on my partner who I’d brought in to help me with the business end of the company – sales, finance, marketing, partnerships. I was a technical guy and didn’t want to deal or feel comfortable with business issues. Over time, I realized that my partner wasn’t able to contribute in real operating terms and was more of an advisor”.

“I had raised money from some angels. During the shutting down process, I went to them and asked them for their feedback. They told me that I had to learn business and as the founder-CEO couldn’t outsource it to someone else. While at an MNC, I had beenexposed to finance and business, it had never been my direct responsibility as there were always others who would do it for me.Here I had to roll up my sleeves, understand, execute, monitor and measure performance and the plan myself. After all, it was mycompany!My business partner then started pressurizing me for making good on the loans that he had helped arrange.
The angel investors told me that he had to stand in line like everybody else and, in fact, as a director on the board of the company he should be at the end of the line! One of the angels wrote me an additional cheque to help me tide over the closing expenses on the condition that I do not disclose the matter to his wife!”

“Anyway, I learnt who my friends were during this process. My wife stood solidly by me during this entire saga. I didn’t go back to the VC as I felt bad for having rejected his offer. In hindsight, the VC would’ve made a difference. There would’ve been a lot morediscipline, more focus on business and on the model. Anyway”.“I then joined another MNC and used my entire first month’s salary to pay off the angel who’d written me the cheque.
I attended finance classes, invested in the stock market and made some money. This also helped me pay off some of my personal loans”.“I’m free of all debt now. I advise a few startups on technology and on helping them shape their product from a market standpoint.I’ve learnt that technology without a market context and an efficient delivery and support mechanism is worthless; I believethat the experience has made me emerge as a much stronger and better person”.

“I’m now ready for a startup!”

I’m sure there are many of us with similar experiences. The learnings of this entrepreneur should resonate within all of us. What do you think?

——-
Guest article by Sanjay Anandaram, a passionate advocate of entrepreneurship in India; He brings close to two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, venture investor, faculty member, advisor and mentor. The views expressed here are his own. Article republished post author’s approval.
—-

Also Read: Why you should not be an Entrepreneur [And why I am still an Entrepreneur!]

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Watch It Or Not – Yet Another Movie Review Website [Bollywood]

Okay, so we have yet another movie reviews startup – WatchItOrNot. Sounds like ‘hot or not‘ of movies and they pitch just right for the Bollywood brigade. Though we have had couple of movie review startups like ReviewGang, ReviewBag before and the good international biggies like Rotten Tomatoes & IMDB are still good at it, but there is definitely a cavity in movie reviews space which possibly Watch-It-Or-Not can fill. The cavity, or hollow of Bollywood.

Watch it or not is designed to handle the mass (read trash) production capacity of Bollywood. It deploys power of opinion polls, crowd-sourcing & reputation management of movies, actors, directors and reviewers to bring out a curated and vetted review of a given movie. Users just need to fit a specific niche of audience and get the juice of reviews.

IMHO reputation management is pertinent for a huge production industry like Bollywood which produces the largest number of movies in a year (worldwide) and yet less than 5 flicks ever make good sense. I mean the story-writing is simply awful, and invariably the viewers have to dumb-down to watch the movie to its logical end. How many times do we ever recommend a Bollywood movie for quality, execution and creativity? Does not most of it goes into the invisible trash can, and be forgotten soon after the launch?

Well, this is what Aamir Khan has to say about the level at which Bollywood works today. Gasp!

And yet many of these movies do well on the box-office. It is strange how this happens, but it surely kind of hints that there are several ‘boxes of audiences’ in India to which movies of different quality and execution suit. Each box does well for a specific movie at any given point of time and they all make money. Or at least most of them say they do. Whatever, it’s complicated, and that’s where Watch it or Not plans pitch in and solve the movie reviews problem.

I really like the way Watch It Or Not is attempting to solve the separation of movie reviews for the fragmented audience. They have an index for everything – ratings of actors, actresses, directors, professionally hired reviewers from the ilk of traditional media, crowd-sourced voting from actual viewers like you and me and a rating for overall gist of the story. Of course this can go to a much deeper level when one starts pointing to cameraman, music director, special effects also, but I guess my expectation to filter Bollywood juice is really high and WatchItOrNot does not yet get there.

For the WION team, my two cents is that quality of reviews & reputed reviewers are going to be the key for your website. Interface, as of now, is quite usual and may be you guys have a long way to go in terms of look & feel, placement of poll elements and perhaps ensure ad cleanliness. If you take this problem seriously, probably there is room to build a classy product ground up too, instead of just using regular widgets from DIGG, WP etc.

What do you think about Watch ItOr Not Pi readers?

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Google Checkout in Des? [PI Cartoons]

Dear Friends of Sid,

It has been a long break, but Sid is back. Ashish just posted something about Google launching its Checkout in India. Sid thinks that “localization” is the key.

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Admaster – online ad effectiveness tracking and consulting

Shanghai-based Admaster (admaster.com.cn) provides online ad performance tracking, research, analytical and optimization consulting services for advertisers. According to its CEO Vincent Yan, advertisers can save up to 30% of their online marketing budget using their services.

“In China, there is no third party organization to provide accurate market information about the online media. A lot of websites overstate their daily visitors and pageviews, which is unfair to those high quality media who tell the true traffic. Moreover, click-fraud is still prevalent in China. Many pageviews and click-throughs are artificially created by machines,” said Vincent.

Admaster’s services help advertisers to track real traffic to their advertisements and detect incidents of click-frauds. “If a publisher has overstated its traffic, we will know and the advertiser can ask for a refund or another forms of compensation,” said Vincent.

Apart from these, it can also track if there is overlap between media coverage. There are tools for media saturation and reach & frequency analysis. Advertising spending is wasted if the ad is shown to the same users many times without a proper frequency control. Admaster can also provide the demographic data of audience of different websites, helping advertisers to evaluate the target audience concentration of each website.

“Through a partnership with a global research agency, we have installed hundreds of thousands cookies onto a well-managed online user panel pool in China. We know their demographic data and where and when these panel are reached by advertisers’ ads (coded). We use these data to estimate the demographic data of audience in different ad campaigns and on different media. And then, we can evaluate which media has the best cost per target audiance reached” said Vincent.

Admaster charges about 3-4% of the advertiser’s online budget as fee for its services. Vincent said, this is worthwhile as Admaster can improve advertisers’ ROI – usually 10%-30% of their online ad budget is saved. The core product Ad-Master has launched about one and half year and Admaster has 60 clients so far, including McDonald, Puma, Johnson & Johnsons, Unilever, Acer, etc. It expected to have 200 clients this year.

“Also in 2011, new products such as Survey-Master, Panel-Master, Buzz-Master will be introduced to the market to meet the more sophiscated needs from Chinese advertisers,” said Vincent.

He thought there are 5,000 potential clients for his services in China. “There are 3,800 advertisers just on Sina alone,” said Vincent, “Every of them can be our clients.” By 2013, Vincent hopes to expand his company to the global market. There is already a believer of his ambition. Admaster has got an investment of several million USD from GSR Venture, a China and silicon valley based VC firm.

http://www.gsrventures.cn/en/index.html

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We have a winner for Founders Drinks 2.0′s pitch

OK, so voting is closed for Founders Drinks in Singapore on Wednesday. The winner, by a slim margin, is Socialgenie.com, which allows you to “Track your relationships, never lose touch with anyone important and recall everything about anyone you’ve ever met!”. Socialgenie.com beat out Wondershake (46.57% to 43.71%).

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Our CES highlights

The 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show held early this month was a four day exhibition of the latest products and technologies from all over the world. The show attracted over 140,000 attendees and participants, some 5,000 registered media, 30,000 international attendees from 80 countries, keynote addresses by 22 top corporate CEOs, over 250 conference sessions, more than 900 speakers, and 1.6 million square feet of exhibition space.

With every last square inch of the Las Vegas Convention Center complex completely filled, along with all of the adjacent Las Vegas Hilton’s conference space, plus hotel suites and meeting rooms in large quantities there and at the Venetian, as well as activities at many other hotels around town, it has become such a massive event.

Extravagant Exhibitors

Apparently more than 80 tablets were introduced at the show, many of which were running Google’s Android operating system. Certainly, electric cars and associated technology were featured, including a new all-electric vehicle announced by Ford. Intel launched a major new class of CPUs intended for the low end of the market. 3D products were everywhere, including introduction of consumer-class 3D camcorders. Google TV was being shown, regardless of announcements in the weeks before the show. And, TV makers such as Samsung were stressing the new technology features that are going into their LCD displays to improve the quality even more.

Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Intel, and Microsoft had huge areas. (Microsoft actually built a two-story building with drop ceiling tiles, lighting, ventilation, and office space). General Motors was giving electric car rides in a parking lot. Chinese computer maker Lenovo took over a nightclub and turned it into a showroom.

Technology showcase

The coolest technologies at the show had to be a tie between Motorola, KDDI, and Cyberdyne (not that one but close). Motorola introduced a family of cell phones with accessories that turn them into a full notebook computer, while KDDI was showing an early technology demonstration that could eventually allow a virtual camera to be placed anywhere the director wants on an athletic field. Cyberdyne tries to live up to its name with an actual exoskeleton permitting paraplegics to stand and walk (currently being leased for $2000 a month to patients at several Japanese rehabilitation clinics). Special mention to Samsung’s new 10.5-inch Galaxy Tab with a pull-out full-sized keyboard.

As for tablets, Motorola’s Xoom was easily Best of Show, being the most impressive looking tablet among a sea of Android tablets at CES while RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook looks to be a strong contender as well. AOC, the Taiwanese LCD display and TV maker, will shortly introduce an entry-level tablet under $200 (and maybe under $185), with no contract required. StreamTV Network’s eLocity will have models with a huge amount of storage – 256GB. Finally, Toshiba appears to have well-thought-out all the ports that would help you connect to various accessories, such as HDMI and USB.

For the TV fan, the size of the displays is growing again – 60 or 70-inch diagonals (and perhaps even a few larger ones). Quality continues to improve, with various technical features being added to make the picture look great. I would have thought that standing up close to a giant display would look grainy, but was in fact impressed by how handsome the picture appeared on these giant TVs. Plus, multiple types of IPTV (sending television over the Internet), including Google TV, were being shown by companies large and small.

Looking Ahead

The high-tech community, voting with their product introductions, is bullish on the U.S. and world economy. Everyone is optimistically looking toward expanding markets in new as well as current categories of devices, and is expecting improving consumer demand. With many of the new introductions said to be coming in the next few months rather than at the end of this year (as was more common in the past years), we will all see a large growth in the tech available to the public. Looks like fun!

Greg Weinstein has published two books and numerous other feature and news reports in the field, currently serving as News Editor and Producer on Future Talk. He can be reached at greg@futuretalk.net.

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