Apply for Dalian-based CHINACCELERATOR Incubator Program NOW!

Chinaccelerator is a 4 month startup accelerator, based in Dalian/China and hosting its second batch in June 2011. 

 

The program is part of the TechStars network and offers extensive support for startups including seed funding, mentorship, and free office space. If you are ready to rock the technology space, it's time to APPLY NOW! Applications will be closing on May 15th.

 

This is the deal for startpus & entrepreneurs that join the program:

 

• 10,000 CNY per founder (for 3 founders at max).
• Extra budget of 10,000 CNY per company (for research, sales, marketing, product development, etc...).
• Intense mentorship from the best.
• Free space, some extra electronics and even some food.
• A chance to pitch investors at the demo day.
• All CA asks is some equity in return (4 to 8%).

Here is an overview of last years startups that participated out of which 3 already received follow-up VC funding: http://chinaccelerator.com/en/startups.

 

Below are 2 presentations with details on the program and an shapshot of what life is like at CHINACCELERATOR. Check it out.

Chinaccelerator - Enter the Dragon

View more presentations from Cyril Ebersweiler

Life at Chinaccelerator

View more presentations from Cyril Ebersweiler

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Startup Skills: Why did McAfee buy Singapore’s Tencube?

Here’s the next installment of my series looking at startup acquisitions. You may have read my post about being acquired by a Valley giant, or my analysis of the Maktoob-Yahoo deal, previously.

Today, I’m looking at Tencube, makers of the mobile phone security product WaveSecure, which was acquired by McAfee* in July 2009. This deal is also relatively simple to understand, although understanding it is easier if you understand a bit about the computer security market.

Cybercrime or viruses/spyware/hackers target volume platforms to get the best return on their efforts – this is why most viruses today target Windows as it has the highest OS volume share. Mobile phones use different OS with different kernels and software, and as such have different vulnerabilities than PCs; and therefore require different, custom security products as compared to PCs.

Historically, the mobile OS market was relatively fragmented with few transactions and so they received little attention from virus writers. Android and iOS has changed this as there are now fewer platforms and Android is predicted to have the largest unit share globally. As an open platform with multiple vendors customizing it, is also likely to have more vulnerabilities and given that mobile commerce appears to have finally arrived, through apps, malware writers now have an incentive to write viruses. It is an environment where each of the major vendors needs an Android product.

McAfee may not have had a product in development or decided to get a jump on the competition and buy an established product with existing distribution, customers and a proven technology that they could plug into their global sales force. It is most likely a combination of the two factors, but let’s analyze the transaction using the framework:

1. Core business: Both Tencube and McAfee are in the business of developing and selling end point (PCs, phones, other devices) security software to consumers. McAfee understands the product issues, security threats and consumers and their needs. The business processes and functions are similar, however as WaveSecure is sold through an app stores and is for mobile, the product, marketing and sales solution are different.
2. Market gap: The gap here is a little different and it goes back to the essence of the weakness of large valley companies, it is hard to innovate when you are so big. But, you still need new products to grow sales and meet new market needs. For McAfee the gap was likely a strong mobile security offering.  Tencube, on the other hand, had a good product (I assume) and was early to market but lacked the distribution relationships and marketing budgets to really grow sales, which McAfee had.
3. Post-acquisition ease of integration: From the outside this would also appear to be relatively straightforward. McAfee likely did not have a large mobile product, engineering or marketing team and simply plugged Tencube into their organization to fill that gap. Tencube likely had a small sales and marketing team which could be easily absorbed by McAfee. The product technology would need to remain separate, with technical integration likely to focus on reporting, data/status exchange and potentially licensing APIs between the desktop and mobile phone products (to allow your desktop license to provide you with a free mobile phone security product).
4. Good code and minimal skeletons: Given that this is a security product in what is an engineering driven industry – and the brand damage that could be done through a poor product, a proper code review would have been done and assumedly passed. Likewise for skeletons.

My next post will look at the deals that you don’t hear about – the ones that fell through. Why do they fail?

Also see Startup Skills: Analyzing a Yahoo acquisition and 5 steps for Southeast Asian startups to get aYahoo acquisition

* Disclaimer: Although I worked at Yahoo! when Yahoo! acquired Maktoob, I was not involved on the acquisition or integration team and do not have any inside information; my assessment is purely based on what I know from public resources. Likewise, for Wavesecure the acquisition sponsor at McAfee was my boss at Symantec, but I do not have any inside information on the acquisition, only public information

Patrick Williamson currently works as an independent consultant in the consumer Internet and in his spare time he advises startups. Previously he had built many partnerships working in business development at Yahoo! Southeast Asia in Singapore and as a global product manager for the Symantec consumer business unit in California. You can find additional information on this subject at more at his blog at his blog at PatrickSEA.com.

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China Counts In The Forbes Midas list

Three-quarters of the venture firms on the Forbes Midas list for 2011 are active in China. Ten of the top 100 tech investors in the tally are regular dealmakers in China. Any surprise?
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Silicon Dragon: China Counts in Forbes Midas List

Any surprise that China plays a major role in the Forbes Midas list this year? All in all, three-quarters of the firms on the just-published 2011 rankings are backers of China startups and emerging companies. Ten of the 100 tech investors on the tally have done deals or overseen their firms’ strategy in China.
Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, who ranks tops with Facebook, is also the Palo Alto-based investor’s biggest champion for China deal making. He has led Accel’s deals and funds with Beijing-based IDG Capital Partners, a high achiever in China (think Qihoo 360, Dangdang, Baidu, Soufun, Ctrip, QQ).
Other scorers on the Silicon Valley heavy list who have shaped their firm’s China strategies:
To read more of this post, see my regular blog at Forbes:
http://blogs.forbes.com/rebeccafannin/2011/04/07/china-counts-in-the-forbes-midas-list/

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Introducing the 10 startups pitching at Echelon 2011 Malaysia Satellite

The second leg of Echelon 2011′s Satellite event will see 10 startups from Malaysia pitching at Zouk Kuala Lumpur on April 21.

The startups come from various industries, ranging from food to fashion and all the way to customer relationship management, in a bid to be the company that changes the way we use web and mobile technologies.

Here are the details for Echelon 2011 Malaysia Satellite:

Date: April 21, 2011

Venue: Zouk Kuala Lumpur, 113 Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, 55000, Malaysia

Time: 12.30 – 6pm

Register for free here.

We want to prime the audience with background information regarding the pitching startups so that you’ll have an idea on what to expect for the event. We have some really great companies and founders pitching.

Read on to find out more about the 10 startups and remember to come to the event so you can vote for the People’s Choice winner.

Feed George

Feed George aims to aggregate geodata on a single platform providing user with the ease to search data via data categories and feed source through georss. With Feed George, bloggers who wish to add geographical information to their posts are able to do so too.

FLOChip Sdn. Bhd.

FLOChip’s product, 31Storey, seeks to bring in a bigger social element into online shopping by marrying Facebook with eBay. Shoppers can share their fashion tips or lookbooks with their friends while following their favorite participating boutiques. For online shop owners, 31Storey provides a single platform to market, sell, receive payments and monitor sales data easily. Co-founder Ong Teng Siong is a YCombinator alum who sold a company to Loopt.

WorkCrowd by AdExcel Online Networks Sdn. Bhd.

WorkCrowd aims to help build and strengthen bonds among co-workers by being a social platform for the workplace. WorkCrowd seeks to incentivize the initiatives of co-workers in getting to know each other through unlocking badges. The platform can also assist the transition of new workers into the workplace by helping them familiarize themselves with the culture and facilitate knowledge transfer.

FanXT

FanXT is a privately funded website that seeks to be the worldwide leader in fantasy sports. Seeking to expand the fantasy sport offering beyond only that of popular U.S. sports, the website offers a one-stop fantasy platform that works on the web, Facebook, iOS devices, Android, Blackberry, Yahoo! TV and Google TV.

CellKast Games Pte. Ltd.

CellKast Games uses mystery deals that combines proven social game elements and discount offers to drive product discovery through their product Tikam. The concept behind the mystery deals idea is that the company believes that too many options creaties confusion among customer which makes them unhappy. By randomizing what deals customers receive, it lowers expectations while increasing satisfaction. Got a deal that doesn’t suit you? Give it to a friend as a gift!

Posttude

Posttude aims to provide an address for every one by being the new postal code system for the whole world. The service uses the geotude algorithm to assign a 13-number geotude to users which acts like and IP for the location.

MobileApps.com Pte. Ltd.

With the applications industry heating up and drawing a lot of attention from app developers, MobileApps.com seeks to standout from other app stores by allowing developers to retain 95% cut from sales while making it easy for developers to syndicate advertisements of their apps to target end-consumers. By being a global cross-platform app marketplace, MobileApps.com seeks to cut through the hassle and problems of buying apps through other App Stores that may have payment restrictions.

Soft Solvers Solutions Sdn. Bhd.

Aiming to help Asian businesses tackle customer relationship issues, Soft Solvers Solutions’ Second CRM offers on-demand solutions to small companies which covers business operations like sales, marketing, customer support and project management. Small companies can choose to automate their businesses with the simple and cost-effective solutions offered by Second CRM.

Alphapod

Always tweeting about your meals before you devour it? Why not turn this information to help a lost, hungry, soul through Alphapod’s product, WootFood. WootFood aims to be the best way to find good food around you. By displaying highest rated food that is sorted by distance from the user, the service helps foodies discover new and amazing food offerings in the vicinity.

Motif Channel

Motif Channel’s product name explains it all, if you understand Cantonese. Fongfeikei.com gives event tickets a second chance if their buyers are not able to make the event. Ticket-holders can post their unused tickets on the website while potential buyers can place their request for even tickets that they missed out on. A matching algorithm will then notify both parties when a match is found. Not sure where available tickets are? Fret not. Fongfeikei.com’s future offerings includes a geolocation feature that allows users to see the location of available tickets and the event.

To find out more about the judges for the event, check out their bios here.

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Technopreneurship and the Early Stage Ecosystem in China – 29 Apr

The Business Angel Network Southeast Asia (BANSEA) is holding a workshop at the end of the month for startups, angel investors and anyone else who wants to venture into the Chinese market, with a focus on the TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications) sector. The program is divided into two parts to discuss, amongst others: current mainland China market status & trends, the Chinese internet; early stage ecosystem in China, local angels & VCs, resources and fundraising.

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About The Workshop Trainer

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Chris Evdemon is an entrepreneur and active angel investor in China and Singapore. His long list of positions include: General Manager of Incubation Programs at Innovation Works and Principal at Innovation Works Development Fund (IWDF) in Beijing. He is also a Founding Member of the China Business Angel Network (CBAN) and Board Director of BANSEA in Singapore.

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Event Details

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When: Friday 29th April 2011
Time: 1.45pm – 5.00pm
Where: Scape, 2 Orchard Link, Infocomm Lab 1, Level 4, Singapore 237978
Fees: SGD 120 (SGD 100 if you register by 15th April)

Register here by 22nd April.

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Rediff Launches SlideSongs [Mix Photos and Music]

Rediff has launched Slidesongs, a service that lets you mix photos and music.

Once you login to Rediff’s MyPage, you can select photos,  audio and wait for Slidesongs conversion. The service is essentially a way to get people to upload rich media content/start using MyPage, and importantly do quite a bit of social sharing (which brings pageviews to Rediff). But frankly, there is nothing exciting about SlideSongs.

Features like these add little value to Rediff, which cannot really boast of a social graph (all earlier attempts to build a social network has met with very little success).

In fact, after testing SlideSongs (its been 30 minutes and the conversion is not yet over), I am surprised to see Rediff’s lack of solid strategy in content business. The site was the one that introduced Internet to a lot of people and lately, simply lost out to foreign products for lack of innovation. Actually, Rediff never competed with Yahoo/Google for user attention – the site just enjoyed its early mover advantage and is now losing all the mindshare.

Rediff faced its first revenue decline in some time; a continued focus on innovation was announced at the same time. The downturn did not help, as ad inventory and revenues both shrunk. Somewhere in the midst of its growth and battling new competition, Rediff lost sight of the audience. They first gave the Indian language approach a shot – Rediffmail was made available in 11 languages – but this was later abandoned as it hardly ever got used.  There were a couple of acquisitions for language and transliteration tools. There was an attempt at becoming a player in the search engine wars. There was even a desperate sounding attempt at creating a developer platform – this at a time when the audience itself was thinning! A mobile application was launched, and later Rediff toyed with mobile ads as well.  Vakow was bought, and then wrote off reasonably quickly.

It is not that none of the product ideas above had merit, or should have not been attempted. Its just that as a company, there seemed to be a lack of direction, or coherent strategy. Any one product could have been a winner. [what we wrote in our earlier coverage/Remember Rediff?]

Rediff does need to experiment, but bold experiments will change the game. These kiddish features doesn’t excite people, other than Rediff team.

What’s your opinion?

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Early Stage Startups– “Take It Personally”, Will You?

You know the big difference between large organizations and startups? Rather why large organizations fail to ‘be like’ startups?

While there are a whole lot of bureaucratic challenges, lack of accountability tops the chart. Nobody owns the failure (and everybody wants a portion in success).

Ever wondered why few large organizations never ever bounce back? [Think Yahoo!/AOL]

Deep inside, nobody takes it personally. The blame game/pass-the-buck is the biggest growth inhibitor for companies/individuals.

But What About Startups?

I believe each and every piece of failure (plus product) has to be taken personally by the team. If your webapp sucks in performance, the sales guy also has to take it personally. Yes, the sales guy! Only then he can (passionately) convince engineering team to look at it (and show the $ picture).

Traditionally, we are supposed not to take things personally, but not true if you are building a business.

By taking it personally, I mean ownership. Ownership to make that change. Ownership that goes beyond one’s position/designation in the company. Ownership to ensure that the company delivers the best service, irrespective of whether you are an engineer or the CEO.

The reality is when you take things personally, you take care of the situation the same moment (also translates to sleepless nights, something entrepreneurship is akin to). A true blue successful startup is one that builds a culture where employees take it personally (of course in a healthy fashion/ that’s where “culture” plays a role.) and customer support spans beyond the support team.

That’s when you (founder) have arrived as a leader. That’s when your startup is ready to move to the next level (also read: What Separates Startup Men from Poys [The P word]).

As a founder, there is no doubt that you are taking it too personally, but here goes a pat on your back when your employees start taking things personally and build a culture where mediocrity isn’t accepted. And all of this ‘taking it personally’ business will involve a lot of friction in the team (nobody wants to be questioned) – so be prepared.

But then isn’t it worth building a team which is red-eyed/obsessedly focused on success of the company?

What’s your opinion?

[Image credit: Earthworm/Flickr]

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The Best Ever Advice On Building A Sales & Marketing Machine

Sales & Marketing is quite a b*tch and most of the (geeky)startups actually face hurdles in cracking this piece.

More so because geeks inherently have very little respect for sales professionals and importantly, lack of understanding of the entire process (and behavioral aspects).

Sales Funnel

Here is a great presentation by David Skok, GP at Matrix Partners detailing the entire Sales&Marketing process very beautifully. A must view.

Building a sales & marketing machine

View more presentations from David Skok

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Why Exits Are Important As A Startup Metric

My friend, Rama Mamuaya (aka @rampok) from DailySocial.net (the top tech & social media blog in Indonesia) wrote a tweet this morning, “How exactly does one measure a startup’s success? Exits?” I want to emphasize why exits are very important as a whole for the technology scene in Southeast Asia. It is one of the major reasons why top tier venture capital firms from US like Sequoia and Benchmark Capital and super angel investors from Silicon Valley only pump their money to China and India instead to an emerging market like Indonesia and its surroundings. I will explain why exits are important (as a metric) for the success of a start-up and how it impacts the venture financing in the entire region of Southeast Asia.

To start off with, there are very few companies in Southeast Asia which are true venture capital firms and they seldom take chances with up and coming start-ups. The reason is simple because most of the people who run these companies are former financiers (people who are investment bankers or works in the private equity firms), and to be even more blunt, none of them are former entrepreneurs, which means that they have no access to talent who you can rely on to scale up the business development, sales, marketing and operations in the future. The reason why venture capital works in the US and China is based on three essential components: (a) market size and revenue (b) talent and (c) number of exits which either goes towards a public offering or an acquisition.

Oftentimes, when I have drinks with my friends who do investments beyond S$4M and above, I will hear the following comment from them, “You know why we are not interested to invest in early stage start-ups, there is no exit that are worth more than US$30M (=S$36M) across the whole Southeast Asia.” I did a check on that claim and even Friendster who was bought by MOL (rumoured to be about US$27M from various sources) and Transfer.To which was acquired by Ingenico last year (S$35M). That claim turns out to be true. That’s nothing wrong with what these investors are saying. The central doctrine for them, is that out of 10 investments, 9 will fail and 1 will succeed. If I have a 100M fund (and break it on an average of US$1M per company), I have to invest on 100 companies. It means to get back the return for my stakeholders, I need 5 companies to hit US$100M valuation per company. That’s simplistic but you can understand why investors from Silicon Valley have no interest in Southeast Asia as a whole.

If you look at the startups in China, all of them are moving towards either IPO or acquisitions and most of them are hitting above US$50M if they manage to scale in the country. Once investors see more exits above a certain price, their appetite for creating an investment company in the region becomes higher. Although the whole Southeast Asia is currently growing with new venture firms like Neoteny Labs, SingTel Innov8 and East Ventures, the money for early stage start-ups are still few and far between. Unless the Indonesia market booms like how the start-ups in China are, it is very unlikely to see a Sequoia SEA or Benchmark in this region.

So what should you do as an entrepreneur? There are two schools of thought on this. One school is focus on creating a company with vision and reach there without being sure what the exit looks like. This is what they teach you in entrepreneurship courses. Even though I teach a course on that in NTU, as a practitioner, I also teach the other school. The other approach which I am advocating is to start from the exit and work backwards in time to see what kind of company you should build with a set of realistic timelines and milestones (plus a Plan B should everything go south). Unfortunately, to do this, you have to be very experienced and have a good network in the industry to spot what is going to be happen in 3 years time. However, that being said, nobody including myself, can be right about which school of thought is better.

I had an interesting discussion with a professor from a famous overseas business school recently on this, where I advocate that we should teach students in Asia who attend classes on entrepreneurship & private equity to think about exits instead of wasting time on thinking about grandeur visions. Yes, young entrepreneurs can have grandeur vision and goals but if they want to do a Facebook, Twitter and Google, they should pack up their bags and head to Silicon Valley in California or Zhong Guan Cun in Beijing. The reason is simple, the risk appetite is larger and there are people within that ecosystem who can help them to scale. Otherwise, their best case scenario is what happened to tenCube who gets acquired by McAfee (and Darius Cheung is now an investor to Neoteny Labs which is a very good sign of people gaining success and contributing back to the community). What we need is not one Darius, but at least 100 of them (exiting with acquisitions above US$15-US$20M and it means 9000 failures along the way) around Southeast Asia to attract investors to come for the early stage companies, and not just Singapore but the region as a whole. Once that happens, we can have entrepreneurs with grandeur vision.

Originally published here. Image credit: lansakit

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Have Your Own PR News Room With Sweden’s MyNewsDesk

Swedish news exchange site, Mynewsdesk has opened its first office outside Europe and its first in Asia. Founded in 2003 and acquired by media giant NHST in 2008, Mynewsdesk enables startups to have “a modern PR service to better connect with journalists and key opinion leaders”.

The company serves more than 23,000 companies and has seen success across northern Europe with offices in their home country, Sweden, as well as in Denmark, Norway and Finland. Last year saw revenues of 50M SEK (USD 8M / SGD 10M). After Singapore, Mynewsdesk launched its London (UK office) last week and plans to open one in the US (most likely NY).

From their website, this is what they do:

“All news releases and other PR materials are stored in an online social media newsroom. The information are optimized for top search-engine rankings on Google and other major search engines. It’s then instantly synced and uploaded to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and WordPress – a time-saver, since you can publish all your material in the same place. At the same time, the press material is distributed to journalists and other influencers who have requested to receive updates in their topics of interest.”

For a video introduction:

Startups and brands can have a Mynewsdesk-hosted newsroom or your own hosted newsroom. Interested companies should contact Johan, the Singapore Country Manager for Mynewsdesk.

Journalists can use Mynewsdesk to follow companies and startups for free.

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