Nifty Uses Its Cloud To Accelerate Social Game App Business In SE Asia

Nifty, a Fujitsu subsidiary and Japan’s 4th largest ISP, announced last week that it would use their own cloud facility and encourage Japanese social game app developers to deliver their services to ASEAN countries.    Japan’s METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) helps the project financially, and several social game apps running on “Nifty Cloud[J]” are expected to be introduced shortly in Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines.

Participating game apps are:

• Multi-player card game “Unlight” (English and Chinese version available on Facebook, developed by Techway[J])
• Social tree planting game “Yggdra Mamoribito” (Japanese version available on Mixi, developed by Skycraft[J] and Eighting Networks[J])
• Social RPG “Atsumare Rasubosu Hunter” (Japanese version available on Yahoo Mobage, developed by Neverland Company[J])

Note: In order to try the game apps via links stated above, you are required to log on to each of the social network platforms.  The app titles are subject to change for their international marketing.

Nifty is expected to promote these apps in South East Asia and conduct a survey of trends in the users for investigating the future potential of social game app business in the region.

This project is jointly operated by Japan’s 3rd largest ad agency Asatsu-DK, US-based CDN operator CDNetworks, Paypal and Tokyo-based system developer Marietta.

Via: japan.internet.com[J]

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Case Filed Against Facebook in India for ‘Hate Gandhi’ Group

Lucknow police has filed a case against Facebook for a group ‘I hate Gandhi’ that was created on the site.

What’s surprising is that there still are close to 10 groups/pages when you search for ‘I hate Gandhi’ (excluding lesser known Gandhis like Varun/Rahul).

Hate Gandhi on Facebook

This isn’t the first time Facebook has faced such issues  in India – earlier few school girls were suspended from school for using Abusive Language on Facebook.

As far as Facebook is concerned, it’s the new Orkut! Expect more such cases (Orkut faced legal cases over anti Shiv sena community, and even shared a user’s IP address with police (anti Sonia Gandhi group)

Who do you think is liable for such goofups? The platform or the content creator?

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Apple Launching iPad in India [January 28th, Price: 26K]

While the world is buzzing with iPad2 story, Apple has finally decided to launch iPad in India.

iPad is coming to India on January 28th and the good news is that the price of iPad in India is between Rs. 26K to 44K (Wi-Fi version of the iPad will be priced somewhere between Rs. 26,000 to Rs. 33,000 and 3G+Wi-Fi version will be priced between Rs. 33,000 to Rs. 44,000, depending on the capacity, i.e. 16GB, 32GB and 64GB).

Apple iPad

Rewind and here is what we wrote when the iPad was launched

Traditionally, Apple has ignored India (the apple store was down for almost 15 days and there was hardly any response from Apple on the same), but it’s time Apple revisits it’s India strategy (they earlier shutdown the India support office, owing to backclash regarding outsourcing et al).
And why is India important for Apple? Look at the query volume for apple iPad from India.

India stands second in the query volume (for apple iPad) and even though (and 10th for the keyword ‘apple tablet’).

Finally, the product will officially touch Indian shores and as they say, better (i)late than never.

The sad part is how Apple treats some of these markets as a dumping ground (for obsolete products).

Anyways, are you buying an iPad?

Do you think  iPad launch will hurt Samsung Galaxy Tab’s sale in India? What about Notion Ink’s Adam?

Watch this interesting video

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This School in Remote Bihar has WiFi, Uses Skype for Learning [Inspiration]

Remember Nalanda? The University was center of higher learning and one of the world’s first residential universities. Well, a lot has changed in Bihar since then and the change has mostly been for bad (or worse).

But entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs and Chandrakant Singh, a M.Tech from IIT Bombay has started ‘Chaitanya Gurukul Trust’ that is unique in many ways.

Present in Chamanpura village (where there is no electricity), the school has 45 rooms across 2 Wi-Fi enabled floors, 4 volleyball courts, 4 badminton courts and a cricket pitch (swimming pool is under construction) – i.e. a world class infrastructure.

Chaitanya School

Since the village still doesn’t have electricity, the computers are run on power generators and teachers are selected from different parts of the state. Remote teachers use Skype for teaching and basic tuition fee is Rs 300 for Class I and increases by Rs 100 for every class upward.

Why do this?

One of the Objectives of the school is

To provide world class quality education in Bihar to prevent brain-drain from and at the same time stop the out flow of money from Bihar to different states.

Chandrakant Singh started thinking about this when MNS stared their anti-Bihar campaign in Mumbai

“I was greatly disturbed, and wanted to arrest the migration of students from Bihar, in my small way.

The first instinct was to get in touch with the principal of the primary government school in Chamanpura with an offer to fund six students who would pass a scholarship test. But the principal never conducted the test.

Singh then sought the advice of Surya Narayan, dean of IIT, Bombay, who suggested that he make a business plan for a revenue-generating, self-sustaining model instead of taking the charity route. Singh then wrote a 100-page plan — a blueprint for a Rs 30-crore campus that would be completed over 10 years, including a school, an engineering college and an R&D centre. He e-mailed the plan to 3,000 friends, eight of whom agreed to fund it. With these eight and himself, Singh formed the Chaitnaya Gurukul Trust.[source]

Inspiring and daring!

The point to be noted here is that Chandrakant Singh wrote a business plan for the entire setup and didn’t live on charity – that’s what makes the cut.

And as we debated earlier, social entrepreneurship does not mean a not-for-profit organization [read: Defining Social Entrepreneurship].

[img credit:msn]

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Groupon acquires Malaysian deals site GroupsMore

Groupon snaps up yet another daily deals site in Asia and this time it’s in Malaysia. Groupon announced today the acquisition of Malaysian daily deals site, GroupsMore.

This is the fourth daily deals site in Asia Groupon has acquired in a span of two months. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Rob Solomon, president of Groupon said in a press release, “The acquisition of GroupsMore is further evidence of Groupon’s strong commitment to working with only the best collective buying sites throughout Asia and across the globe. We will continue to help shape the way local merchants market themselves in every corner of the world.”

Last month, Groupon announced acquisition of Beeconomic in Singapore, uBuyibuy in Hong Kong, and AtlastPost in Taiwan while a teaser website for Indonesia popped up several days later.

Do check out the e27 interview with the GroupsMore founder Joel Neoh and what he had to say about the group-buying trend in Malaysia.

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Japan’s Mobile Social Gaming Giant GREE Partners With China’s Tencent (QQ)

Big news from Asia’s social gaming world today: Tokyo-based mobile social games juggernaut GREE ($3 billion market cap) just announced it will tie up with China’s biggest web company Tencent ($45 billion market cap), which operates the massive QQ platform.

The plan is to “export” GREE’s social apps to the rapidly growing market for mobile games in China as well as to offer games made in China to GREE’s 22 million Japanese users. The focus of the partnership is on “GREE Platform for Smartphone”, which was announced by the company last year (more info).

Under the agreement, developers following the specifications of the platform will be able to offer games to users of GREE and Tencent. GREE has so far attracted over 200 companies in Japan to join the platform and says that Tencent will help them to localize their games for the Chinese market.

In the official press release, GREE cites a source according to which China had 120 mobile gamers in September last year. To put things into perspective: Japan’s Internet population stands at around 100 million.

GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka announced the move into the Chinese market in summer last year. His company established a US subsidiary just a few days ago and also invested in Singapore-based mobile platform mig33.

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