Coca Cola Japan’s Facebook Promotion App Stopped Two Days

Coca Cola Japan’s Coca Cola Park [J] is one of the most successful Facebook promotion is Japan. The original promotion site, which supports both Facebook and Mixi, embraces 10 million members, half a billion page views per month. Sugoi Jihanki (= great vendor machine) is a Facebook app provided in the Coca Cola Park.

On March 2nd, the Sugoi Jihanki Facebook app became inaccessible [J],

The app has been suspended for 2 days, and has recovered on March 4. Only information explained by Coca Cola Japan by its marketing lead Hiroto Ebata’s tweet was that Coca Cola side’s operation had an issue. What kind of issue was not disclosed. Ebata also requests that there should be special Facebook accounts which are not banned for this kind of huge promotion. He tweeted that he would be happy to pay for it.

At the same time, Ebata introduced his new book on the Coca Cola Park promotion. “Coca Cola Park wo 100 bai tanoshimu Hon”(= A book to enjoy Coca Cola Park 100 times more) will be published tomorrow, March 5 with 1,000 yen (US$12).

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Kawaii Security – Over 30 Computer Virus Personified In Japanese Security Book

It is understandable to make your favorite web services drawn as characters, but how about internet viruses?

A Japanese publisher Sansai Books started selling a security book “Kawaii Security”, which enlightens you computer virus history since 1980′s, with over 30 infamous viruses anthropomorphized in cute anime-style characters. Which virus being personified in the book has not been disclosed yet, but I guess good-old pre-Windows Morris Worm, Code Red and Nimda should be in them, Japanese virus Yamada and Kintama as well.

Four anti-security applications are also personified under the authorization of the software vendors. It has 5 stories of original security comics and CD-ROM of anti-virus trial software Panda Internet Security 2011, too.

via Akiba Keizai Shimbun

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Amazon Cloud Makes Landing On Tokyo, Japan

Amazon Web Services announced on March 2 that they had added a Tokyo data center as its 5th in the world, 2nd in Asia after Singapore.

Almost all of Amazon Web Services except Elastic MapReduce, Elastic Beanstalk, Import/Export are already available. The official blog says that there are several Japanese companies have been already using the Tokyo region as a private beta testers, including Zynga Japan.

The following Amazon Japan’s banner tells “Cloud Has Landed in Japan – get new applications and services from new Tokyo data center”.

The official blog says “I can tell you that private beta testers have been putting it to the test and have reported single digit latency (e.g. 1-10 ms) from locations in and around Tokyo”.

Yuuki Namikawa, known by his web infrastructure blog measured the latency on the release date, and got around 2.7-14.8 msec round-trip-time(RTT), which is quite fast if you compare it with RTT with Amazon’s US West or Singapore data centers.

Although the fees on the price list for Tokyo data center are bit more expensive than other regions, Japanese developers react favorably on the price. Generally, price of web hosting tends to be more expensive in Japan than in US so the little addition still keeps the Amazon’s price competitive.

There have been several Japanese “cloud” service providers, like Nifty Cloud, Sakura Internet, etc., used by Japanese web companies and startups.

The rumor of the Tokyo data center had been talked about a year, as Amazon once said they had plan to open two data centers in Asia, and some people leaked on Twitter that Amazon Japan might be seeking to rent a data center in Tokyo.

Even with US and Singapore data centers, there are many Japanese web services using Amazon Web Services. Only disadvantage people here complained was geological distance to other data centers, which causes inevitable latency. This new Tokyo region may make the trend fast.

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Video:Raynova RAY 1 Android tablet with 1Ghz processor and traditional Chinese style UI

Chinese company Raynova recently shows off an Android tablet that’s called RAY 1. With high specs, and a promised low price, this tablet has arose some buzz on Chinese tech sites in a short time. Raynova emphasizes quite a bit on RAY 1’s UI, saying that it combines a lot of traditional Chinese style. It’s powered by a 1Ghz Freescale chip that’s based on a ARM CORTEX A8 processor, 7 inches 800*480 capacitive touchscreen, 512 MB RAM, a USB port, a 2-megapixel camera, and a 3500mAh battery.

Its battery life allegedly could last 6-8 hours. It’s display support multi-touch, which was clearly showed in the second video below. In the video, it runs the popular game fruit ninja and shows awesome response on multi-touch. The price is said unbelievably to be just around 1000 Yuan (about $150 USD). According to the company, it will be launched on March 18.

[Source: Chinese Engadget]

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Minnows can beat the giants [Lessons From Ireland-England Match]

Yesterday, I was delighted to watch probably the most exciting and historic match of Cricket World Cup 2011. It was great watching minnows Ireland beat relatively mighty England through bravery powered by skills that were applied intelligently.

There is a lot for startups to learn from it; I thought it will be worth sharing with you all what I think was my key takeaway from this match and get to know your thoughts as well.

After the match when I reflected upon this incredible win of Ireland, what I realized was the significance of the timing and application of a power play. We all as startups plan a power play to become big in our growth journey as a startup, what matters is when we go for the power play and with what sort of attitude and skills.

Situation

Ireland was 111/5 in 25^th over and was chasing 328 and it was only possible to achieve it in a dream. Choice was between continuing at the same pace and end up losing (with dignity) or attempt to play unconventionally and try for a historic win (Glory) without worrying about the level of dignity of loss. They choose glory! (The attitude)

The Strategy

What was required for the dream to become a reality was to score at an amazing rate for a few overs while they have wickets in hand and get closer to target without losing further wickets. Probability was bleak!. O’Brien’s only hope was the power play, which they took in 32^nd over with immense confidence on his and his captain’s (on the other end) abilities (Risk taking and self-confidence) .

Achievement: Input Vs. Outcome

It took Kevin O’Brien to smash the fastest century in World Cup history to register the highest run chase ever in a World Cup.

Relevance to Startups

As startups, especially bootstrapped ones, we keep putting hard work and grow our ventures slowly and steadily, whatever may come. We all wish for glory and wanna win the game against the biggest of competition despite resource constraints. We all have a plan wherein we will enter a phase where we will need to take “Power Play” – in terms of scaling business through aggressive marketing efforts but we mostly avoid taking it early as we are waiting for more funds, more resources, and more customers to have in place before we unleash ourselves.

Is this the right approach? I think not, especially because more resources/funds is something only a few can manage (VCs have a 99.79% rejection rate), so one must not delay their plans beyond a point else you will end up losing, only solace will be, it may be a dignified defeat (some sort of low value exit).

What Ireland taught us is that you might not have the best skills (experience and record) and resources (5 wickets in hand) but, if you are playing for glory (WIN) then have the self-confidence and go for the kill, apply your mind to come out with a plan that might be risky but is feasible, only then you can get glory despite being a minnow.

So think and identify when to take your power play (when business demands) and how to go about it despite the constraints. You definitely need lots of luck but luck also favours the brave only!

[Guest article by Sumeet Anand, Founder CEO of Kreeo (i-nable Solutions), a startup in the space of Enterprise 2.0 and collective intelligence.]

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Is There a Business Model in Deal Aggregation Space?

We earlier covered the list of group buying (a.k.a. Groupon Clones) in India and given that there are so many players in this industry, it’s quite natural to look at aggregation as the next step.

That is, a services that aggregates deals across these deal websites and helps users identify the deals, filtered by category/city etc.

First, the Positives

As a consumer, it’s just not possible to track each and every deal site on a daily basis. There are too many of them and while many a times there are overlaps, it still is a pain to go through so many deal sites. Hence the need for deal aggregators.

Special Group Bargain Deal

That is, deal aggregators mitigates the pain of subscribing to all these deal sites and also helps you find the best deals (theoretically speaking). Most importantly, aggregation model works only when

• There is enough chaos (i.e too many creators, targeting various categories).
• There is enough mass (of consumers) interested in sifting through the chaos and find something that suits them.

And given the rate at which deal sites are mushrooming in India, the time is NOW to build your deal aggregator.

What Does it Take to Crack This?

What does it take to crack the deal aggregator model? If you look at some of the successful aggregators (Kayak specifically), one of the attributes that worked in their favor was timing. Back in India, samachar.com (Rajesh Jain’s venture) was truly one of the first aggregators (of news) and was the homepage for a lot of us.

With time, personalized/RSS feed readers have replaced that model (of samachar), but wherever there is a problem of plenty, there is an opportunity to aggregate those hatful of creators.

What Are Indian Deal Aggregators up to?

While we publish the entire list of deal aggregators very shortly (do get in touch with us*), looking at most of the deal sites, here is my observation.

- Mostly fly-by-night operators.
There is no seriousness to this model right now, and is more of a ‘let’s see how this goes’ model. Can you quit your day job to take this suddenly-developed passion to next level?

- Most of them work on WordPress.
Nothing wrong with that (after all, the grand daddy, i.e Groupon started as a WordPress blog), just that the lower entry barrier has enabled anybody to set up an aggregator. All you need to do is take the RSS feed of deal sites and push the same on your site. And in cases when feeds aren’t available (watch out guys, Feeds are the simplest distribution mechanism you can ever build), simply scrape the site.

- Lacks user base.
Ultimately, it’s all about the user base. Most of deal sites have more than 20K-30K ‘Facebook fans’ and email subscribers, so a new player has to match the same. The deal aggregator should reach out to a LOT of people- and that’s where newspapers and big media sites will make the cut (Rediff?).

- No serious engagement model.
An aggregator has to have an engagement model (driven by site UX/distribution etc)– that’s the value they add to the deal sites and importantly, the bargaining power they bring to the table. Right now, most of the deal aggregators are doing what free WordPress plugins allow them to – i.e. rate a deal, like/dislike a deal, share with friends etc.

- Sales anybody?
Your startups/venture’s ultimate moment of truth is when you go out in the market and sell stuff. Sitting in your comfort zone of home won’t really make the cut (read the Flipkart story).

Most of the deal aggregators, like I said earlier believe that affiliate model will fetch them a huge amount of money (and someday they will jump the ship and startup on their own). Let me tell you a bad news here – this whole story of ‘we build a deal model online’ will not work at all. If you are a serious player, you have to get your hands dirty. You have to sell and there is no escape from this.

-

To cut the long story short, if 2010 witnessed the flood of deal sites in India, 2011 will see the same with deal aggregation sites.  Only time will tell if these ‘part time’ hacks transition into a serious business.

What’s your opinion? What do you think will make the ideal feature set for a deal aggregator?

Back to the title: Is There a Business Model in Deal Aggregation Space?

* If you are a deal aggregator site, send us an email (ashish/naman @sitename) with a one liner description/USP of your site.

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Kuliza Acquires GizaPage, Social Media Aggregator

Bangalore based Kuliza has acquired GizaPage, another Bangalore based startup that provides businesses a tool to bring all of their social channels under a common roof (in real time) as well as offer businesses an integrated suite of applications that empower their social media team to publish, engage and learn more about their community, content and engagement on the social web.

Kuliza offers social technologies for business (online communities, social commerce, social CRM etc) and also provides mobile apps and cloud related services to enterprise customers.

As Kuliza helps businesses engage with their world through social technologies, we found immense synergies with the GizaPage team, which for the last two years had been focusing on helping brands integrate different social media channels and create a unique experience for their users.[Kuliza blog]

As far as Gizapage is concerned, this is a talent acquisition and the product will continue to live in the near short-term and operate independently.

Earlier, 2020 social media firm was acquired by Publicis Group.

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Jobs: Marketing Manager, Tech Evangelist, PHP Developer, Technology Director

Pluggd.in reaches out to India’s early adopter community– right from geeks, hackers to marketers and sales professionals. It’s raining jobs and here are some of the wonderful job opportunities – across the country and across various roles (and geography).

Job Profile	Description
Marketing Manager Location: Bangalore	Roles: - Coordinate with internal teams and external agencies for developing new marketing creatives and keeping the existing ones up-to-date - Coordinate with SEO and PPC agencies to get marketing strategy devised by Marketing head executed - Complete affiliate management including onboarding, sending updates on new products and releases, answering any queries they have and having the FusionCharts brand on the tip of their tongue
Tech Evangelist cum Community Manager Location: Bangalore	Develop technical content for our blog and soon-to-come newsletter including implementation tutorials, feature discussions, use cases and community showcase - Handle the company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts completely – share educative and interactive content on them on a regular basis, reply to all queries asked and manage minute-by-minute interactions - Develop technical content for external blogs and websites as and when required
PHP & MySQL Developer Location: Chennai	As a Developer, you will be responsible for design and development initiatives in creating high level designs and complex system architecture for the product and website. You will be responsible to develop the detailed specifications and implementation plan for the inhouse and outsourced development team. You will identify and architect frameworks and methodologies that deliver value to the product.
Core Team – Engineering Location: Pune.	1. Good understanding of MVC architecture, Agile Development methodologies & language independent Object Oriented Concepts 2. Understanding of process flow and ability to see through execution while clearly recognizing the dependencies and impact points.
Core Team Member – Sr. Software Engineer Location: Pune	* have experience building web applications either in PHP/Python/RoR * have experience with MySQL/PostgreSQL, Testing Frameworks and BDD/TDD tools, Git etc. * 2+ years of work experience
Software Engineer Location: Mumbai	* Enhancement / Development of new modules for our current product. • Working closely with engineering team & founders of the company. • Design and implement key technology parts and make them available to other developers as framework or components. • Be proactive, opinionated and pragmatic, and yet a team player.
Software Design Engineer in Test Location: Pune	- Ability to solve complex problems and write automation systems – Ability to elaborate testing techinques and commanding development procedures by understanding the functional requirements.
Online Community Manager Location: Anywhere (Work Virtually)	We constantly require community managers for our increasing clientèle. In order to apply you should have the following attributes, 1. Web savvy 2. Good internet access 3. Professionalism towards your work Prior social media marketing experience is a plus.
Software Engineer – Back End & Front End Location: Mumbai	Must have excellent OOPS knowledge and should have worked extensively on MVC based frameworks. – Extensive knowledge and work experience using tools like PEAR and Smarty. – Detailed knowledge on HTML, Javascript, AJAX and css a must. – Knowledge of open source scripts like ZenCart, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress will be a plus.
Software Design Engineer (Platform Tools) Location: Pune	Atleast a bachelors in computers. – Atleast 3 years of experience in software development. – Atleast 3 years of experience in Linux. This would warrant a strong command over the OS to the extent of system administration.
Various positions in Software Design Engineering Location: Pune	- Strong inclination to command “nothing is impossible” in Software. – Strong skills in any object oriented language. We don’t believe that language qualifies merit. Rather language is a conduit to building software. – Knowledge in database, dataminining, algorithm, distributed systems is a mus
Technical Director (Anywhere)	We are looking for a new Technology Director interested in bringing their CS skills to the public service sector. Our Tech Director needs to start in April and commit to working over the Summer in India. During April-June, you will be working from your hometown while the team is in the US. In the Summer, our team will travel to India to meet up with you in India and implement our technology with Indian partner organizations.

[To reach out to India’s early adopter/geeky community, submit your job requirement here]

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The Super Duper List of Groupon Clones in India [18 and counting]

It’s been exactly a year since we spotted the trend of group buying sites or Groupon clones mushrooming everywhere. The past year has been actioned filled and mostly the center of attention in the startup ecosystem. SnapDeal was leading the game all along with boatload of marketing $$s being pumped in, the one thing that hasn’t yet changed. SnapDeal was testing the ads on the big ecommerce network Ebay, who has also entered the space.

The best bet of local content players entering the market is also seeing action with BuzzInTown launching a deals section and Taggle riding on AskLaila’s reach. The big daddy of all news was the attack of the original, Groupon entered India with acquisition of a relatively unknown SoSasta.

Groupon will be ramping up its India operations in full swing soon. There has been criticism and dis-interest from VCs and investors all over the world around the scalability and sustainability of this model given the army of sales guys required to get a new deal up everyday but that does not seem to stop Groupon from doing an IPO early next year.

Google India also revived its self service “coupons” feature in Google places which might be a scalable model but for now they are facing challenge with user education and spam. For Google it seems more of an acknowledgement system saying, “I generated this lead for you” then actually any direct revenue source. Though in future the “Offers/coupons” might be the default ad copy for local businesses on Google Adsense.

Between all this we have unconfirmed news of biggies like Indiatimes, Rediff (this is confirmed) and few print media players entering this space.

Here’s a roundup of all the groupon clones we have come across till date in no particular order. The list is non-exhaustive, if you know of more mail us at naman at pluggd dot in. We will add it here.

1. SnapDeal – They are the leaders in terms of traffic with Alexa India rank under 25. That is more traffic than Naukri or IRCTC, making it the No.1 ecommerce portal in India in terms of traffic. Yes, I just said that.
Not only that but it has actually crossed Groupon.com’s reach in terms of global traffic (Alexa). How much did they spend to get there? How many transactions/revenue do they do per day? Well, we will keep that for the founders to reveal. SnapDeal is a one of the only ecommerce player, apart from OTAs to take up the TVCs route (to best of my knowledge).

Bangalore based Grabbon was acquired by SnapDeal and according to the founder that was the turning point for them. They are lately aiming to be THE place for deals and offers with even deals from institutes like NIIT on offer. I have been a big critique of SnapDeal’s execution strategy all along but it seems the marketing $s can actually buy you all the attention in world and in course a multi Bn. $ Rs. valuation also.

Startups, they are into a different ball game. They are good at what they are trying to achieve with SnapDeal, the way they want to achieve it. Don’t burn your fingers by replicating or following them. The game is beyond our playground.

Oh, did i mention they roped in a deal for date with Gul Panag.

2. Taggle – $8.75Mn funding is what got it the initial attention. Traffic is rising steadily with a major upbreak in mid-January. Advertising is driving traffic but the spend isn’t much. They have about 187K fans on Facebook but the activity is really negligible. The whole idea of mixing ecommerce with social reach of consumers seems to be almost dead in all other sites as well.

3. MyDala – This was my favorite in terms of quality of deals but with time the edge is lost. Traffic is pretty much stable. 54K fas on Facebook with little to no activity.

4. Koovs.com – Traffic is seeing new high since new year. They are bringing in electronics on sale as well. Not much action apart from Delhi / Bangalore. Exclusive local deals just seem to be missing.

5. SoSasta/Groupon India – The action seems to be just starting here. The ads are getting more visibility lately. Surely will be the player to watch out for. For now they either have repeated deals from other competitors or it is mostly ecommerce deals. They have all the insights from their global presence but will the international strategy work in India?

6. Dealivore – Traffic is very unstable and on a downtrend. The 306K fan base seems to be sleeping. The team hasn’t shown anything remarkable yet. They already claim to have spent over Rs.2Crs. and this is the reason why Zuckerberg is so rich.

7. DealsAndYou – The founders hate me for their acquisition announcement that we covered earlier but I will try and reciprocate some love (while being neutral). The fanpage with 171K fans is the most active amongst all the above players. Their initial stand of making it a mix of social media promotion + lead generation for local businesses seems to be strong. They are also exploring a dedicated section for travel/holiday deals. The ad spend is aggressive and they stand second to SnapDeal in terms of traffic.

8. BuzzInTown – Their long standing content play is definitely visible on the fan page. Their updates about deals get double the feedback as compared to DealsAndYou, though same in % of fans. The presence is only in Delhi and Mumbai, with Bangalore being added lately. The portal is willing to spend Rs.25 per new registration for the deals(DGM) which seems to be a sensible UAC but isn’t very low. As far as I remember they were earlier spending Rs.10 per registration during non-deals days. They haven’t entered deals for electronic products yet which is a sign of the fact that they have more in the kitty to show before they give up, if they ever do.

9. Ebay – The big daddy of e-commerce is still testing its local deals app with presence in Delhi and Mumbai. It is certainly giving a step-motherly treatment to local deals though. Who in the world came up with the URL koupananIndia.ebaysocialapps.com. Its even difficult to find a link from ebay.in to this app. No doubt the traffic is so poor. They are barely able to sell 3-4 deals for every offer.

10. Groffr.com – One player that is actually standing out with deals for high value purchases like real estate, cars, bikes etc. They seem to have some offline action as well. Activity is mostly around Mumbai.

11. Groopoffers.com – These guys are trying to achieve everything with deals on restaurants, salons, real estate and products. The action seem to alive and building up, may be they will make some buzz.

12. Coupon2Buy – A relatively new player that is not showing much action and not doing anything remarkable yet. The deals are just getting started in Delhi, Pune and Mumbai.

13. CityOffers.in – Based out of Ahmedabad the action here is around this city only. Again a very new site with not much moolah to get in the race.

14. Foodome – Based out of Chennai these guys are concentrating on restaurants deals and home delivery of food only. Absolutely no marketing at all till now.

15. Dealmagic – Not sure if these guys are starting up or shutting down as they have no live deals. The fanpage hasn’t seen any update in past 3 weeks.

16. Masthideals – Not sure what they are upto. The “h” in the name suggests they are south India based, Chennai indeed. No deals live currently, past deals were around beauty salons and electronics mostly.

17. Groupon.in – Started as Groupoff they claim to have acquired the “Groupon” trademark in India. Deals are decent and traffic seems to be building now.

18. Scoopstr.com – Based out of Bangalore with presence in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore. Deals are decent, not much to talk about.

If we missed covering you, drop us a line at naman at pluggd dot in. If you are in the list, feel free to throw brickbats in the comments without getting personal.

Finding these too much to track for a deal? We will have a list of their aggregators as well very soon.

If you managed to read till here do share what you think of this space. Is there a serious business model in deal aggregator model now?

Recommended Read: Business Model 101: What’s the deal with the Group Buying sites in India?

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