What adjectives will come to your mind when talking about cultural relics in historic museums? “Mysterious”, ”valuable”, “antique”, or “solemn”? Recently, a picture of Xiaoyou(鸮卣), a bronze ware from Shang dynasty preserved in Shanxi Museum, has been posted and forwarded in hype by microbloggers on Sina Weibo. Xiaoyou is called “the cutest antiquity”, for its appearance looks just like the character in popular video game “Angry Bird” by Rovio.
After Sina microblogger “Beijing A Nian” posting this “cutest antiquity” on Weibo, Xiaoyou’s appearance, shape and function have been discussed since.
Retweeted over 5,000 times and commented over 500 times, some microbloggers call it “outer-space creature ”, while others say it’s ancient version “angry bird”. Final explanation is given by “Wenwuchina.com (China Antiquity)” website official Weibo, saying that Xiao (鸮) is an owl, while Xiaoyou was used as a kind of drinking vessel. It’s an exquisite artwork from late Shang Dynasty (1600BC – 1046BC) – more than 3,000 years ago!
Digital Garage, Japan’s Internet conglomerate known for operating price comparison portal Kakaku.com and helping Twitter’s business operation, held a semiyearly conference event last week, which is called Next Context Conference 2001 Spring, where Japanese well-known tech investor Joi Ito and the world’s Internet authorities came together, most of whom have expertise in social media, radiation measurement and disaster prevention.
Dr. Adbur of Twitter started his speech with the first slide of Namazu, a giant catfish which causes earthquakes in Japanese mythology.
Starting with a keynote speech by Abdur Chowdhury (@abdur), the chief scientist of Twitter Inc., he explained how Twitter work had worked efficiently to communicate among people when the massive earthquake had hit the Tohoku Region on March 11, by showing us some animated infographics of how many tweets being exchanged across the globe during the time.
In the first session, five panelists from Japanese and foreign media discussed how mass media should tell the society what happened in the disaster while Twitter and other social media succeeded to deliver up-to-the-minute voices from the devastated areas. Hiroyuki Tsuruta[J], a student entrepreneur who had developed a website collecting tweets supporting our relief efforts, Pray for Japan[J], also joined the panel.
From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Abdur Chowdhury (Twitter), Hiroyuki Tsuruta (Pray for Japan), Hiroko Tabuchi (New York Times Tokyo Correspondent), Tomoya Sasaki (Digital Garage) and Tatehiko Koyanagi (Nikkei Inc.)
In the second session, which was titled hardware and sensor network, four experts from radiation measurement device development and crisis response, they talked about how we can obtain parameters to protect ourselves from the invisible enemy when the government and a power company don’t disclose everything on the nuclear powerhouse accident. They introduced RDTN as a web mash-up that helps us learn a lot about what’s happening.
From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Jun Murai (Keio Univ.), Ray Ozzie (ex-Chief Software Architect, Microsoft), Aaron Huslage (Crisis Response ICT Specialist) and Dan Sythe (CEO, Iospectra)
The third session, which is about speed and agile software development. In the crisis time of disaster, web apps helping people are needed to developed as rapidly as possible. Joi concluded that a variety of open source resources and cloud services made it easier to launch a web service very quickly, which contributed a lot to providing disaster-related information to the people having no chance to check out news updates on TV. From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Paul Campbell (HyperTiny), Michelle Levesque (ex-Social Product Manager, Google), Phil Libin (Evernote CEO)
Following more than a dozen of unconferences arranged by the attendees, there was an opportunity for four start-ups being incubated at Open Network Lab[J] to present what they had made for the last several months. Open Network Lab is a seed acceleration program by Digital Garage and intends to be Tokyo’s version of Y-Combinator. All services introduced are currently under development, and I will try to let you figure out what they are, but no details are available at the moment.
Groupelago is a web service that allows you to aggregate social feeds of people you are interested in. Two guys developing the service graduated from Keio University, and they believe it can be used to encourage freshers to join a school club, because it can show them what kind of people the club consists of prior to joining it. The service is currently running in beta and available only among Keio students.
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Frenzee by Masaru Murata (@m_murata[J])
Frenzee is a social web app that allows you to discover new digital content. It helps you connect to someone having the same interest with you by choosing pictures that have been posted on the service. The following video helps you learn how it will work.
Compath.me is a location-based smartphone app that allows you to find discoveries near-by that the other users have posted and you may be interested in.
Satoshi grew up in Nigeria and London and is currently attending the International Christian University in Tokyo. Wondershake is a location-based smartphone app that visualizes your inner taste and connect you with like-minded people around you in the real world. He plans to launch the service at the end of this month, not in Japan but in the US. A judge asked him why he would launch it in the US before Japan, and he answered he believed this app would fit the US market despite average Japanese are considered to be shy and it’s hard for them to make friends with someone else. His answer called a big laugh from an audience.
Finally, Joi proposed a toast to the successful event and expecting more entrepreneurial challenges to come. DJ Amiga started playing music to entertain the gathering crowd.
It’s good to be a copycat in China as long as the market it’s dealing with is still hot, and if you own the .cn domain of the original site, it is definitely one of the keys to get more attention and even succeed. We just heard that Groupon.cn got acquired the group buying giant Groupon.com, the deal is signed today.
Groupon.cn is launched in March 2010. It raised the first round $2.2millions in April 2010, and in December 2010, the second round (reported ~rmb 200-300 millions) was closed.
We’ve been writing about Groupon.com in China, the comments on Gaopeng.com were not that optimistic. So how about Gaopeng + Groupon.cn?
Gang wrote a piece last week speculating a number of Airbnb clones starting in China. Rumors have been circulating that, the Sandberg brothers, who are responsible for Groupon in Germany and Gaopeng in China would be the front-runners in the Airbnb clone race. Today Airizu, has come out first, but the only visible link to the Sandberg brothers is the image saying “”Will soon be featured on Gaopeng.com”
From their website, Airzu says it is an “open online rental-transaction platform, where people who have space to spare can connect with those who are looking for a place to stay. No matter if it’s an urban or suburb apartment, single room or suite, hostel or homehotel, boutique hotel or LOFT, AIRIZU makes it effortless to showcase your space to an audience of millions, and to find the right space at any price point, anywhere.”
The most obvious and unsurprising thing to note, is that if you open Airzu.com and Airbnb.com, it’s just like flicking through a comic strip where only one tiny thing changes at a time and that is the logo at the top left. It is also amusing to see them say the concept of “short-term” rentals has been featured on CNN.com, New York Times and Sina.
Per the Airizu Linkedin page, it currently has 51-200 employees and was co-founded by Alex Z, a Stanford graduate and founder of various companies such as Axial Fashion Inc, Juno Bridal and Coral Sea Vineyard. The only other person in the company with a filled out profile is Cory Z, who is a Beijing Institute of Technology graduate and now the Sales and Marketing Director of Airizu.
With the official Airbnb becoming widely popular now in America and spreading across the globe through their Airscout program (contract sales roles), it will be a tough fight in China. But I think Airizu, like many other localized Chinese businesses, will have the advantage of a local team and knowledge in the domestic market. However, expanding internationally will be a much tougher job for them compared to the Airbnb business.
The Mobile Marketing Association hosts five global forum events every year and this year, the Asia Pacific edition will again be held in Singapore. To take place from 3rd-5th of May, MMA Forum Asia 2011 promises again to a platform for brands, agencies and publishers to share their experiences and success in mobile marketing.
code::XtremeApps:: is the annual 24-hour, round-the-clock computer programming/code jam competition organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee (ITSC), an industry partnership supported by IDA Singapore and SPRING Singapore. The Official Launch of code::XtremeApps:: 2011 will be this Thursday, the 28th of April from 2:30 pm – 5:00 pm at Singapore Management University (School of Economics building, Networked Seminar Room 5.2 level 5). Register here.
Do you develop applications for mobile devices? Come and learn how you can build a business with AdMob, followed by a live stream of the opening keynote from Google I/O in California. This event will be held from 10pm to 1am at the Google office, 8 Shenton Way, Level 35 on May 10, 2011. Please note that, as space is limited, Google will review your application and notify you if you have been invited to attend. Your confirmation email will include more details about the agenda. You have to apply by May 3 to be considered.
Sometimes that’s the mantra of startups and even after you have gone through first level of customer validation, it surely is difficult to keep one’s feet close to the ground.
I was recently talking to an startup (enterprise software) which raised more than $3 million in 2008 (a lot more than what they were looking for) aand made severe mistakes along the way. Here is a shorter version of the (anonymized) conversation:
- Raised too much money
- While we were looking for $2 mn, things were very tricky in 2008/2009 time. VCs usually operated in >$4mn and angels at less than $1million. So we ended up raising more than what we needed and of course, gave away more equity than what we had intended to.
Show me the money
- With extra money, the first thought that came to our mind was ‘where to deploy this?’.
- Pre-funding, we were just focused on ‘what matters most’, but once we had the funding, the focus was on ‘What else can we do?’.
Pre-funding, the story was all about product development (with minimal features), but once we raised Series A, the feature triage wasn’t so effective (hindsight analysis). We were actually looking for big bang release cycles and also we started an enterprise consulting service, in order to extract the most moolah out of our customer base.
In short, we were building an elephant which was earlier meant to do a pole dance.
- Even from a team perspective, we added a few titles (and hierarchy) to bring in more senior team members. Without relevant titles, it’s very difficult to hire in India and my sincere advice to startups/SMEs would be to ensure that information is not lost in the hierarchy (no matter what titles you have in the company).
Keeping a fine balance makes the cut (ensure that titles stay in the position of power, but do not give them so less power that they use information as a weapon to showcase their power].
- So much of money! “Being from middle class families, we had no idea of how to manage a large sum of money”. Not that we got the entire cash on day 1, but the notion of even this ‘paper money’ was new to us. Hiring a good CA firm probably helps, but more than that, a good company roadmap combined with detailed financials (of marketing/support/hiring/salary budget) helps.
Sincere advice to startups – do two levels of planning –
Budget/Forecast for the outside world (i.e. Board, VCs) etc where you share projected numbers. Avoid getting into too much of detail here (use relative numbers like % growth etc)
Budget/Forecast for the internal team. Get into as much detail as you can. Include hiring/firing/travel etc expenses, so that the entire team is aware of budget constraints plus revenue forecasts.
This sounds commonsense, but most of startups do not take these things seriously. In fact, a lot of startups tend to waste money in ‘branded’ stationaries etc, but not justifying such expense is a bigger crime.
How much money is good enough?
During your fund raising exercise, you will come across investment bankers who will suggest you to go for a much bigger round (than what you have planned for), so that you can spend all your effort once and for all in the fundraising process (which might take anywhere between 3 months to 9 months).
My sincere advice would be to really have a budget before you actually follow such advice. That is, do not go for excessive funding just because you are getting one.
Instead, focus on ‘what makes sense for business‘ and you will have the right answer.
Notes from Ashish: Like I mentioned, this is an abridged version of a conversation I had with a startup whose name has been masked, in order to focus on the main agenda (and not digress on topics that aren’t contextual to this article). If you had a similar experience and want to share (anonymously), do connect.
So what if you can’t build it, you can surely be a part of their story!
That’s the InfoEdge mantra and while Naukri rules the job market, the company needs to expand into several new categories that are growing in the Indian Internet space. Of all the corporate stories of investments, InfoEdge surely leads the race with focused investments in Internet companies that have offline business models.
In the last few days, InfoEdge has announced two major investments:
$2 million/INR 90 Million in MyDala
Info Edge (India) Ltd has informed BSE that the Company has approved an investment of Rs. 90 million in Kinobeo Software Private limited, engaged in business of providing online group deals through their website: http://www.mydala.com.
mydala recently forayed into travel deals as well.
INR 100 million in PolicyBazaar
Info Edge (India) Ltd has informed BSE that the Company proposes to invest an additional amount of Rs. 100 million in Etechaces Marketing and Consulting Private Limited, a Company which is in the business of distributing financial products online. Till now the Company has already invested Rs. 200 million as committed in the first round.[source]
Reliance Venture Funded LBS Company Acquired by Groupon
Reliance Venture funded LBS startup, Pelago has been acquired by Groupon.
”
The mission alignment of the two companies and the fact that we’ve taken very different approaches is a big part of what makes this marriage non-strange, and in fact, very complementary and compelling. And what made this a no-brainer was Groupon’s massive adoption and meteoric growth. The opportunity to take the collective brain power and technology of our two companies and point them at a phenomenon already at huge scale is virtually impossible to refuse.
What does this mean for Whrrl? We’ve made the decision to close the curtain on Whrrl for now. Think of it as the end of the first act of a long and complex play. You would be right to expect that the ideas underpinning Whrrl and many of the inventions contained within may reemerge under the Groupon banner.”[blog]
What adjectives will come to your mind when talking about cultural relics in historic museums? “Mysterious”, ”valuable”, “antique”, or “solemn”? Recently, a picture of Xiaoyou(鸮卣), a bronze ware from Shang dynasty preserved in Shanxi Museum, has been posted and forwarded in hype by microbloggers on Sina Weibo. Xiaoyou is called “the cutest antiquity”, for its appearance looks just like the character in popular video game “Angry Bird” by Rovio.
space creature ”, while others say it’s ancient version “angry bird”. Final explanation is given by “Wenwuchina.com (China Antiquity)” website official Weibo, saying that Xiao (鸮) is an owl, while Xiaoyou was used as a kind of drinking vessel. It’s an exquisite artwork from late Shang Dynasty (1600BC – 1046BC) – more than 3,000 years ago!
code::XtremeApps:: is the annual 24-hour, round-the-clock computer programming/code jam competition organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee (ITSC), an industry partnership supported by IDA Singapore and SPRING Singapore. The Official Launch of code::XtremeApps:: 2011 will be this Thursday, the 28th of April from 2:30 pm – 5:00 pm at Singapore Management University (School of Economics building, Networked Seminar Room 5.2 level 5). 
Do you develop applications for mobile devices? Come and learn how you can build a business with AdMob, followed by a live stream of the opening keynote from 
