Research New Markets Using Google Global Market Finder

If you have ever advertised for your company, you should take note – especially if you use Google’s advertising tool, AdWords. As part of a package aimed at helping companies reach overseas customers, Google’s Global Advertiser is a step-by-step guide to help companies research new markets and after, localize their websites and ads (using Google AdWords) into a target country’s language. The first step in this package is the Google Global Market Finder – a tool to help companies assess business opportunities around the world extrapolating from Google Search data, Google AdWords keyword bid and competition using Google Translate’s keyword translation technology; it allows you to view search volumes and Google AdWords costs for your keywords in any market worldwide.

From the press release:

“Global Market Finder helps businesses answer the question: who are my potential customers overseas? Businesses enter keywords that describe their product or service and select the region they’d like to explore. The Global Market Finder automatically translates those keywords into any one of 56 languages used in the selected region. It then ranks each location by opportunity based on factors like local search volume, suggested bid price, and competition for each translated keyword.”

Screenshot of Google Global Market Finder search results:

Click for enlarged version.

How “opportunity” is determined in the Google Global Market Finder is based on an “Opportunity Score”. From the FAQ:

How does Global Market Finder determine Opportunity Score?

Opportunity Score is a dynamic metric based on local monthly search volume, suggested bid, and competition between different locations in your target market. If two locations have the same search volume, then the location with the lower suggested bid receives a higher Opportunity Score. Similarly, if two locations have the same suggested bid, then the location with the higher search volume gets a higher Opportunity Score.

Aliza Knox, Google’s Managing Director of Online Sales in Asia-Pacific says, “There are 1.9 billion consumers online worldwide and tens of millions of businesses looking for products and services on the web and the Global Market Finder and Google Ads for Global Advertisers help advertisers, including the 154,000 SMEs in Singapore and 600,000 SMEs in Malaysia, convert these consumers and businesses into customers and grow their business globally.”

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Silicon Dragon: Renren & Kaixin001 CEOs to Face Off

If it’s the entrepreneur who really matters more than the money or the model behind a startup’s success or failure, then the match between the two founders of competing Facebook sites in China ‒ Renren and Kaixin001 ‒ is going to be an interesting one to watch on Wall Street. Kaixin001 is expected to list in the U.S. soon, following the lead last week of Renren.

Quiet and unassuming where Renren CEO and founder Joe Chen can be dynamic and colorful, the bio of Cheng Binghao is a study in contrasts with that of his key rival. Cheng is a homegrown, first-time Chinese entrepreneur and geeky website developer while Chen, now a billionaire from the IPO, is a savvy returnee and startup master.

How each fare could point to the future of China tech startups on Wall Street. The model of CEO returnee has proven to be successful one, with western-educated and trained Robin Li of Chinese search engine Baidu as its best representative. Now Cheng, as his Kaixin001 is poised to go public, is at the start of a new and different parade of entrepreneurs who take their cues from Chinese culture and upbringing rather than from the West.

The contrasting resources in building these two competing Chinese Facebook sites showcases a shift from the first wave of China’s returnee entrepreneurs to today’s more localized homegrown generation.

Keep reading post at Forbes, click
http://blogs.forbes.com/rebeccafannin/2011/05/11/front-row-seat-as-founders-of-renren-and-kaixin001-face-off/

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US Startup – Minus Makes File Sharing Simple

With cloud computing increasingly becoming more common, so is file sharing.

As the name suggests, Minus aims to strip away all the unnecessary things away from file sharing to make it an extremely simple and quick experience that people just get straight away.

I interviewed the young co-founder of Minus, John Xie to get insight into the story and idea behind the start-up.

John’s Background

The Shanghai-born entrepreneur, now based in Boston, is only 21 years old and is currently waiting for graduation for his degree in Entrepreneurship from Babson College.

John says “he has been an entrepreneur for all his entire teenage life”. Just last year, he was named as a Finalist of Business Week’s ‘America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs – Top 25 Under 25’, for founding Cirtex, a web hosting business at just 13 years old.  Cirtex now has more than 10,000 customers and employees 25 people and has about US$2 million in revenue this year.

Adding Min.us

In between skipping classes and managing Cirtex, John has managed to create another cool start-up called Minus, a cloud based file sharing service. It started when John met his business partner, Carl Hu at an entrepreneur meet-up in September 2010. Carl was a Director of Technology at Progress and formerly worked at Microsoft.The pair hit it off and knew they wanted to work together. After bouncing ideas, they set out on the path of creating ‘the simplest possible sharing service’. The first prototype of just photo-sharing was launched in October in 2010.

After being discovered by a small community on Reddit, Hacker News and TechCrunch, Minus quickly created buzz and it “took of sooner than expected.” People then started asking how to get involved or invest.

Until only a few months ago, Minus was bootstrapped but after feeling the pressure they took a private angel investment of US$200k

Minus is a simple, social way of sharing stuff

Minus makes sharing pictures, documents, music, videos and files simple, instant, and free. Minus lets you drag files from your desktop and folders directly to your browser to start sharing or via our desktop and mobile apps. The web version is live as well as the Android mobile app and Android Honeycomb tablet app with the iOS and Windows Phone 7 version in the works. The aim was to create the best experience and workflow that allows users to start using it within minutes. It is built on Amazon’s cloud servers and works extremely quickly.

Unlike Dropbox, which is file syncing service that allows you to save a file on the cloud and access it anywhere online, Minus is more lightweight in the sense it doesn’t back up files or allow file uploads more than 50Mb. With Minus, you don’t have to install any software of even sign-up and it’s more social. You can follow what other people are sharing or keep your sharing private.

How it works

It’s surprisingly simple! When I looked at it, I was expecting to see more steps or things to fill in.

To use it, you simply drag and drop a file from your computer and it turns it into different types of URL short-links. One type is for viewing the file and the second one allows you to edit the file. You can also download files as a zip file.

The closest thing to Minus was a service called Drop.io, which was later acquired by Facebook then shut down.

Who’s using it?

Officially launched in November 2010, Minus has over 300,000 active users and served over a billion page views and over a million uploads. John says “People come back because it’s so easy to share.”

Currently, early tech adopters are using it but it includes teachers, professors, students and musicians sharing all types of files to make their life easier. John says the “goal is to make it so anyone can use Minus, even people who have never shared”. To keep iterating, John believes it is important to be humble and listen to user feedback.

One user said “Excellent design! Minimalistic, Simple, Easy to use and attractive. Congratulations … I hope they continue making improvements and not spoil it!”

A global vision

Although the business model is not yet clear and they are not charging users, Minus wants to “revolutionize how people share across platform”.

Since John is ethnically Chinese and hears of the buzz around Chinese start-ups, he eventually wants to capture more Chinese users and target the growing market.

By focusing on simple and quick, Minus definitely offers everyone a way to share.

 

 

 

Related posts:

1. Hong Kong Start-up, PandaForm Makes Online Forms Easy
2. Travel In China Web (1)- Web2.0 is For Content Sharing, Not Service Sharing
3. Shanda e-book unit file for IPO in the U.S.

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Japanese Virtual Diva Hatsune Miku First US Tour In July

Japanese virtual singing instrument application Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku will hold a concert at “ANIME EXPO 2011” in Los Angeles on July 2. This is the first time that she holds concert oversea.

Recently, Toyota USA featured Hatsune Miku for its Corolla promotion.

Therefore ANIME EXPO and TOYOYA jointly hold the concert of Hatsune Miku.  Sega produces 3DCG and Crypton Future Media takes charge of the entire supervision.

She already held three concerts in Japan (The first live was in 2009).  Huge transparent screen of 2m×6m was fixed in the stage and her 3DCG was reflected over it. All other members of her band are real human.

Her latest stage in the last year,

The concert in Los Angeles will be held with the improved version of this concert.

Hatsune Miku topped Japanese music chart the first time as non-human in 2010.

See also:

Hatsune Miku Live in Los Angeles

Asiajin articles on Hatsune Miku

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku

(C)SEGA
(C)Crypton Future Media, Inc.

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SF New Tech Calls For Entries To Present At Japan Night

Brandon Hill, the CEO/founder of San Francisco-based web consultancy btrax, gave us an invitation to potential presenters and attendees at their tech start-up demo event that will take place next month.

As of this writing, four start-ups of Kayac, Chatwork, J-Grab, and Conyac have passed the first screening.   Entries to present are acceptable until May 20.

Here’s some of what we have covered the previous event. (including Ustream video)

• Live: Six Japanese Tech Start-ups Present At SF NewTech Japan Night
• Event Report: San Francisco Japanese Tech Entrepreneur Night

Who’s Brandon Hill:

Born in Hokkaido, Japan.  He has a Japanese mother and a American father.  Prior to founding web consultancy btrax in San Francisco in 2004, he was attending San Francisco State University where he started his carrier as a designer and programmer.

SF New Tech:

It is literally a tech start-up’s demo and presentation event that takes place monthly at a nightclub in San Francisco.   The event celebrated its 5th anniversary last month.   Some events in a year feature start-ups from outside the US., which are titled like Belgian Night and Japan Night.   btrax is deeply involved with organizing Japan Night.

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In light of the Japan’s worst disaster, web tech startups are giving the nation of Japan some hope for normalcy and economic recovery with their efforts to go global. In fact, the entry point for web tech globalization seems to be San Francisco.  In a local SF article, San Francisco was named as the second-fastest growing city in high-tech employment, with 65 percent growth over a five-year period.  The whole region which includes San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco supports over $48 Billion in payroll.

Last year we wrote about a first of a kind tech event featuring Japanese start-up web tech companies called SF Japan Night. This year, the organizer, btrax, Inc. a multicultural Web agency, is going to hold the event again this year.

Last year’s SF Japan Night event was the capstone of a week of Japanese tech events and was a huge success. Over 500 people attended the week long event with over 300 people just showing up for SF Japan Night alone. One of the presenters, myGengo received seed funding after the event from the Dave McClure’s incubator program 500 Startups.

This year’s event hopes to be even better with many start-up companies from Japan showing great interest including a company including Kayac. Kayac Inc. is a Japanese digital agency with a strength on developing games and apps and plans to go public within the next year.

In partnership with SF New Tech, btrax hopes to continue the theme of helping Japanese web start-ups go global. Brandon K. Hill, president/CEO of btrax, said “We are again excited to help organize this event and with the great interest in sponsorships we hope to defer the web start-up expenses.”  In fact, Mr. Hill told us that the event just received a sponsorship from NTT Investment Partners deferring a portion of the event’s costs.

This is one of the better platforms for Japanese web start-ups to begin their global journey. btrax works on coaching the start-ups in various aspects of the event, from developing a presentation style to coaching on how to answer business model questions that the SF Tech community audience typically asks. This gives Japanese start-ups an opportunity to interact with the SF Tech scene which is debated to be the hottest tech venues in the world. The btrax team helps the applying companies by providing a free feedback report on their services and if selected the presenting companies will get a more comprehensive feedback from the event’s audience.

Mr. Hill is also planning to hold “International Startup Night” in 2011, and a couple popular companies from SF Japan Night could get a chance to present and compete with other global start-up from around the world.

If you are willing to sponsor please contact them at sfjapannight@btrax.com and if you are willing to apply for demonstration please do so from here.

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Malicious Mobile Threats Report [ 85% of smartphone users do not have any antivirus solution ]

The evolution of our phones into the smartphones will eventually replace our desktop PCs to a great extent. A few years back, the idea of a mobile device with a dual core processor was just a dream but now you can probably buy one off the shelf.

The growth of smartphones has been phenomenal and there are no signs of it slowing down. If you remember from the era when PCs were the primary means of enjoying any digital content, when the number of PCs grew so did the malware aimed at them.

A recent report published by the Juniper Networks Global Threat Center ( GTC ) gives us some insights into the rise of smartphone platforms and the reasons that they are such good targets for malware creators.

Here are some key findings from the report:
- Nokia’s Symbian operating system is the worlds largest mobile OS and so Symbian malware dominated the samples that GTC discovered and analyzed on a daily basis. Malware affecting Symbian devices make up for 77% of the virus definitions found in the Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite database.

- While commercial spyware applications are nothing new to mobile security experts, the greatest malware risk to all mobile operating systems moving forward involves the rapid development, distribution, and proliferation of applications through so-called “app stores”. Installing the app from third party “app stores” does increase the chance of installing a malicious application.

- RIM Blackberry, Google Android and Apple iOS operating systems suffer predominantly from spyware applications. These applications are designed to monitor device communications, often with the capability to control the spyware remotely. Spyware capable of monitoring all forms of communication to and from mobile devices accounted for 61% of all Juniper Networks mobile customer infections.

- Spyware accounted for 100% of all infections for Android devices as reported by Juniper Customers.

- The report also indicated that 85% of smartphone users do not employ any antivirus solution on their mobile devices. Of the 15% that were using an antivirus solution, one of those five users reported having been infected by a malicious application.

The study shows that one in 20 devices is lost or stolen. The mobility provided by these devices does increase the chance of theft or loss but security of data on lost devices is a major concern.

Google’s Android is now the most targeted platform by malware publishers , as per the report. Most notable the recent android malware, DroidDream that was downloaded over 50,000 times in four days, before Google released a security update to remove the infected applications.

Android saw a 400% increase in malware applications since June 2010 untill January 2011

The domain of mobile device security is one that will have a strong impact on the survival of mobile platforms. Apple and RIM have better secured devices currently and hackers are exploiting the loop holes in Android. But the main concern remains that apps available through the official app stores of these platforms may be leaking user data to third parties while the user is unaware of this.

How concerned are you that you might be using an application that tracks the state of your device and provides that data to third parties? Let us know.

The report can be downloaded here : http://www.juniper.net/us/en/company/press-center/press-releases/2011/pr_2011_05_10-09_00.html

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