Nusantara Incubation Fund seeks out Indonesia’s Next Big Thing

Indonesia-based Bakrie Telecom on June 13 launched the Nusantara Incubation Fund (NIF), which plans to invest in companies that deal with mobile and web technology, as well as new media. The iniative is part of Bakrie’s Telecom Media and Technology Vision 2015, which was announced in March.

The fund has been allocated Rp 100 billion(US$11.72 million) to invest in these companies, which can range from early stage to high growth stage companies. Besides funding, the NIF would also work with the companies’ founders to provide mentoring, facilities, and links to strategic partners and companies.

“From here we expect the new Kaskuses and Koprols will be born, and they should be owned by us. Although there will be others to invest, it’s no problem,” said Anindya Novyan Bakrie, the principal of the fund.

The objective of the incubator is to facilitate the best ideas and take it to the higher level by inviting Indonesia’s technopreneurs to submit proposals, business ideas and concepts. If chosen, they will get financial support and support in order to succeed.

Among those who are in the Investment Committee are Hasan Yahya, Shinta w. Dhanuwardoyo, Eric Meijer and Jastiro Abi.

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Startup Roots Speaker Series: Saturday With IBM And Digital Garage

After hectic weekdays this week, Singapore Startup Roots team will bring Jeff Jonas (IBM) and Ian McFarland (Digital Garage) this Saturday, 18th June afternoon. They will share their thoughts and experiences in a candid Q&A.

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About The Speakers

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Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist IBM Entity Analytics Group and IBM Distinguished Engineer
Jeff will talk for 15 minutes about his first startup, going bankrupt at 18 years old, selling his next startup to IBM, innovating within IBM and what he sees next on the horizon.
Ian McFarland, CTO of Digital Garage
Ian was previously CTO of Pivotal Labs, and recently joined Digital Garage as CTO. He will speak for 15 minutes about his current hypothesis on integrated design and software development teams.

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Programme Details

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2.30pm: Ian’s talk on integrating design and development teams
3.00pm: Q&A with Jeff and Ian
3.45pm: Mingling

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Event Details

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When: Saturday, 18th June 2011
Time: 230pm-4pm
Where: HackerspaceSG, 70A Bussorah St, Singapore 199483 (Map)
Register here and bring your tickets (email or otherwise) confirmation for admission purposes.
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The Location Based Food Hunting Game App Goes Android

PT Beabeo, the Jakarta-based developer of the food discovery app,  Tasterous, launched their Android version of the  application on June 13.

The mobile food discovery app allows users to find out what restaurants are nearby, post up location-tagged photos of dishes, follow friends to see what they’re eating , and it incorporates a  social gaming element to encourage users to contribute. The app, which is available globally, uses the Foursquare API for users to check into an eatery, and every Foursquare location is available to Tasterous users.

Tasterous was first launched as a BlackBerry app on April 29, with Tasterous CEO Ronald Ishak promising that the app would be available for the BlackBerry PlayBook, Android OS,  iOS and Windows Phone 7 by the end of the year.

The app, which is about 3MB in size, requires Android OS 2.1 and up to run.

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Liveblogging the Tencent Partners Conference

Open is the new trends here in China, with Renren‘s open platform and 360′s lately annoucement of all-around open strategy in place, now it’s Tencent’s turn, the giant and one of the most profitable internet company is hosting it’s very first “Tencent Partners Conference” in Beijing to tout its open platform products and strategies. Technode is liveblogging the conference for your better comprehension of the burgeoning Chinese open trends.

 

Tencent Fouder and CEO Ma Huateng giving keynote speech:

Annoucing the RMB 5 bliion worth of Tencent Industrial Cooperation Fund has invested over 2 billion in various companies and fields, and the Fund size will be doubled to 10 billion in the near future.

The more successful our partners is, the more succesfful our open platform is.

In the first half of this year, more than 20,000 partners are applying for Tencent open platforms. One example, a 3rd party developer totalled RMB 10 million in one month.

Tencent President Martin Lau:

Tencent have done several things in the past six months, including: 1) Restructuring and adjusting for the open platform. 2) Listening to our customers.

Tencent provides with partners both huge traffic which is very attractive to developers and Tencent’s experiences in internet area.

 

Related posts:

1. Tencent Released Q+ Open Platform, Finally
2. Infinity Venture Partners Akio Tanaka Talks About Investment Strategy From Japan to China
3. Pony Ma Promises Tencent Will Be Open Within 6 Months

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Bad News for IT Guys–80% Girls Do Not Want to Marry YOU

BharatMatrimony recently conducted a survey to understand the most sought-after professionals among Indian men and women and the survey (sample size: 5000)has interesting findings:

• Finance professionals were the most favored marriage partners among Indian women.
• Fifty per cent of the women who took part in the survey, desired to marry finance professional when compared to software and medical professionals.
• Only 20 per cent of women preferred software and medical professionals as their life partners.
• Marketing professionals were the least sort after – with 10 per cent of the women voting in favour of this profession.
• 30 per cent of the men who took part in the survey preferred non-working women as their marriage partners.
• Finance professionals were the most preferred spouses, with 24 per cent votes for the males too.

The survey shows a clear decline in the choice of men to get married to teachers or professionals in education segment. Only eight percent of men preferred teachers as their life partner. It was also revealed that men were more particular about the profession of their life-partners than women.

Salary Vs. Personal Life

When it came to income expectations, nearly 70 per cent of the women expected their spouses to earn between Rs 50,000 and 1 lakh per month. But almost 20 per cent wanted to marry a man earning more than Rs 1 lakh per month. About 40 per cent believed that their profession stood in the way of getting married. Interestingly, 80 per cent felt that their profession played an interesting role for a successful marriage.

The times, they are a changing?

As far as geeks are concerned, they are better off spending more time on Facebook/Twitter. What says?

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A Closed Door Investor-Only Roundtable On Country Investing Trends

Many in the web startup community are gearing up for Echelon 2011, due to take place this Thursday and Friday. While everyone’s having some snacks outside on day 2, I will be moderating a closed door invite-only, investor-only session. Here’s the list of investors from across the region that I will have the privilege of engaging. If you have any questions you think I should ask (and to which speaker(s)), please leave a comment on this post or drop us a note as I will try my best to incorporate as many relevant questions as possible, and post-event, SGE will post the insights gleaned from these cross-border investors.

Roundtable: Country Trends – What’s Going On?

For the first panel, these distinguished gentleman will join me at the roundtable to lead the discussion about investing trends in the various countries. Topics like which verticals are hot, what is a typical seed stage or series A company in that country (do they usually have paying users? what kind of growth in users is typical), any pending regulations that might affect startups etc.. Especially if you are trying to enter that market or simply to research a country, let me know if there are questions you want answered that might help you.

[Singapore] Andrew Khaw, Senior Director (Industry Development) of Infocomm Development Authority (IDA)
Mr Khaw oversees the Industry Development Division as well as programmes for the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and the Digital Media & Entertainment sectors.

[Malaysia] Tan Swee Yeong, Angel Investor of ViC
His current portfolio includes start-ups in the mobile content space, internet marketing, mobile application development and online classifieds.

[US] Tuff Yen, President of Seraph Group
Tuff Yen founded Seraph Group to bring together successful business leaders and entrepreneurs to invest and nurture promising enterprises. Seraph is the only national angel investment fund group in the United States.

[Indonesia] Martin Hartono, Director at GDP Venture and Business Technology Director at PT DJARUM

[India] Amit Anand, Managing Partner of Jungle Ventures
Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Jungle Ventures, an early stage micro fund based out of Singapore

Building An Angel Group In Your Community

This second session will focus on building up the funding aspect of the ecosystem in a community. These three gentleman will each share what they’ve done in their communities and then we’ll branch off into discussions. The three key speakers for this section are:

Tan Swee Yeong, Virtuous Investment Circle, Malaysia [as above]
Tuff Yen, President, Seraph Group, US [as above]
Meng Weng Wong, JFDI Asia

Meng Weng Wong

Meng Weng Wong, JFDI Asia

Meng Weng Wong is an active angel investor in Singapore and a member of the board of directors of the Business Angel Network of South-East Asia.

Again, if you have any questions to direct to anyone on these panels, please leave a comment on this post or drop us a private note.

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Compared: Traffic of Ecommerce Websites In India

As a category, ecommerce is one of the fastest growing category in Indian online space and while most of the ecommerce sites have lost their differentiation (they all sell the same products), here is a quick look at the relative traffic.

Ebay rules the chart, followed by Infibeam and Flipkart. Importantly, BigShoeBazaar (which rebranded to yebhi) moved up the charts, owing to online advertising spend.

What’s interesting to note is that Flipkart is moving upwards at a steady rate (thanks to advertising spend) and there is a fight between Infibeam, Flipkart and Yebhi for the second third position (Homeshop18 sits at second position). And from what we know, Infibeam hasn’t spent a similar effort in online/TV advertising (as their competition), so kudos to them for the traffic numbers.

What’s your take on the traffic report(* )? Any company that you think should be added to this list?

* – This is how the chart looks like (if you add a few more sites)

Is ecommerce business in India reduced to traffic arbitrage?

Recommended Read: Are Indian VCs Hedging Their E-commerce Risk?

Recommended Data: Internet Contributes 3.2% to India’s GDP [Report]

* 1. Comscore doesn’t track Rediff’s shopping section and hence its missing from the list.

* 2. We have compared pure play ecommerce sites and hence coupon selling sites aren’t part of this list.

* 3. Comscore doesn’t track cybercafa data – hence treat this data as a relative measure.

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Meet Japanese Start-ups on Fri and Sat in Singapore

Picture courtesy: Flickr user edwin.11 (used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

Singapore is very hot on tech throughout this week, since Echelon 2011, one of the largest tech conference in South East Asia, will be taking place at the National University of Singapore, where the region's best start-up companies and services will be chosen by well-known authorities. We will join it as a media attendee and bring you live coverage.

Following the event, on the Friday evening (June 17), a Singapore-based blog covering the Asian tech scene, Penn Olson will host a meet-up, and they give Japanese four tech start-ups a chance to pitch their innovative ideas to tech geeks, Internet celebrities and investors who will have come from all across Asia.  Applications for the meet-up have been already closed, but we're expecting to bring you a live streamcast or a live blogging from it.

Participating start-ups are:

• Fashion Style Japan: Yoshio Narita, CEO & Founder of Qomune (See this for more)
• Compath: Hiromichi Ando, CEO & Founder (w/ his colleagues)  (featured in this story)
• Moso: Shinji Murakoshi, CEO & Founder of Moso (featured in this story)
• Cacoo: Shinsuke Tabata, Managing Dir. & co-founder of NuLab, Inc. (See this for more)

Furthermore, on Saturday at 7pm (Singaporean time), at Hackspace.SG which is located at the heart of the country's Arabic district, we will have a casual meet-up with people of the hackerspace and the four start-ups mentioned above. I'm intended not to create an agenda nor time schedule.  But if you are interested in talking with these guys in person, please come and join us. (Plancast)   I'm looking forward to tasting great meals by Meng Weng Wong there, who is the hackerspace's director and also known for being very good at cooking.

See you all there.

See Also:

• Update: Asiajin To Host Reader Meet-up In Singapore On Saturday
• Echelon 2011: Applications For Asia’s Leading Launchpad Program Closing In Two Weeks
• Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up in Singapore

 

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Renren Launched Automotive Q & A service Chewen

Chinese leading social network Renren launched a automotive Q&A service Chewen (means “ask about cars”) in April. Its user base has been growing steady.

When going public, Renren touted its business model as:

social network (Renren) + daily-deal site(Nuomi) + game(Renren Games)

Renren Chief Executive Joseph Chen thought these businesses were interrelated and mutually promotive. “All of them are based on Renren. Nuomi has been growing its business well, and about 60% of its users come from Renren. Actually, all users on our open gaming platform are from Renren.” He said. Renren has a tremendous user base that use it on a daily basis. Since IPO, RenRen has been using existing users on its own platform to grow their user base on new services. Chewen has thus been growing rapidly.

Chewen’s general manager Yu Xiu said, “We wanted to provide more professional automotive service for Renren’s users for a long time.” He sees Chewen as an vertical effort and hopes it has more interaction with Renren’s main platform.

It seems quite some number of “Chinese version of Quora” are emerging these days.   Zhihu (means “do you know?” in Chinese),  which describes itself as “a real Web Q&A community”, is currently in private beta. So are Shanda’s Mifan (means “rice” in Chinese) and Baidu’s Xinzhi. Baidu has already had  Zhidao, a Q&A service for everyone, but real-name social Q&A websites has become the new trend since earlier this year. As the most popular “real name” social network in China, Renren won’t miss the chance.

 

Revenue Diversification Effort

An industry observer commented, “If Chewen is just an independent Q&A site, it might not have much potential. But the fact that Chewen is a part of Renren will help it a lot. The Q&A service could serve as a marketing platform as well as a powerful traffic router. Car makers are too important advertisers to be ignored in China, and Chewen looks like a suitable place for them.

Renren was once dubbed as the “Facebook of China”, but there is a major difference between them: Renren does not make most of its revenue from advertising the way Facebook does. Renren’s 2010 revenue totaled US$ 76.5 million, but only 42% of which came from ads, while 45% came from online games. No wonder Renren is criticized for its over-dependence on games.

So, Chewen might be a revenue diversification effort as well as a vertical Q&A site. We can wait and see if it really works.

Related posts:

1. CheWen, RenRen's Vertical Q&A Service for Car Business
2. RenRen's Professional Social Network Launched, At The Same Day When Linkedin Reaches 100Millions Users
3. Renren working on Quora-like query service

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Meishidaren: We Are Not Just Chinese Foodspotting

In China and most Asian countries, it’s quite common to see people taking pictures of their food. Food is an important part of our daily life, and we would like to share our seasonal indulgences with friends. Last week, I had a chance to interview Shen Haihuai, founder and CEO of Meishidaren(meishidaren.com), a location-based visual guide service for users to find and share the foods they love.

Originally founded in Hangzhou in July 2009, later on moved to Beijing in Nov.2010, Meishidaren owns a young but strong team specialized in product development, operating and marketing. Developed from several previous testing versions, Meishidaren officially launched in Dec.2010, and recently launched its new Iphone version which according to Mr. Shen Haihuan was integrated into more of their ideas about the service.

How did you come up with the idea of establishing Meishidaren? Any inspiration from Foodspotting?

“I’ve always been interested in Internet industry. Meanwhile, I noticed that LBS is a promising direction of the future which we can put a lot of thoughts into. When I saw Foodspotting, I found it’s a very nice idea to have food pictures combined with geographical location; it could develop very well in China since we are one of the greatest culinary countries.” Mr. Shen Haihuai said. “Our initial thought for Meishidaren was very preliminary and therefore lack of consideration of details. Now we put more efforts on the update of interactive functions. Rather than only paying attention on food and leaving people behind, we choose to introduce people and food at the same time.”

Knowing the needs of users and responding fast is the core competitiveness.

In the era of Widget2.0, many mobile phone apps relating to our basic necessities can become our life assistants. Mr. Shen Haihuai states that Meishidaren wants to be the product close to users’ daily life and enables users to interact and share.” For us, knowing the needs of our users and responding fast is our core competitiveness.” In order to be closer to their users, Meishidaren held several offline events such as offering restaurant sample tasting activities to collect views and feedbacks from the users directly. Though always being compared to, Meishidaren wouldn’t want to be considered as a Chinese copy of Foodspotting.”We have a lot of differences in interface and other details. Most important, we grow in completely different soil in China, which means we need to apply completely different business model.”

Currently shows optimistic tendency of quicker growth in number of users.

Since launched less than half a year ago, Meishidaren has gained hundreds of thousands of users, most of which were born in 80s, 90s, even 00s.Geographically speaking, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai are the top 3 cities with large user group. Besides, overseas students especially Asian students form another interesting group of Meishidaren users which can bring some different and fresh ideas about food. Mr. Shen claims, lately after the release of new version, it shows an optimistic tendency of quicker growth in user number, and the latest version gained more than ten hundred downloads in App store within a week.

When talking about next moves and visions for Meishidaren’s future, Mr. Shen claims himself as the kind of person who prefers to talk about what they have now rather than in the future. “Our current concern mainly lies in users’ experience as we want to meet the needs of different users. As for the business cooperation, we have already been in touch with some stores and companies for some cooperation.” Mr. Shen said.

An updated version of Meishidaren is underway, let’s wait for it to unveil itself.

Related posts:

1. Papaya Mobile – mobile social game
2. Eight Chinese Instagram-like Photosharing Apps
3. Tencent Launched Its Instagram-like Photo-sharing App, Q Pai

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Check out the Technology Cocktail Workshop at Echelon 2011

For startups and developers looking to work with or develop for some of Microsoft’s products, Chris Ismael and Thye Yeow will be running a workshop that covers all the development opportunities that comes with Microsoft’s repertoire of offerings.

Check out their response to e27′s interview on what the Microsoft duo have in store for Echelon 2011 delegates.

Seats are extremely limited, so book one right now. (You’ll need an Echelon 2011 conference pass to attend, naturally)

Who should attend your workshop?

Technologists who don’t want to miss out on the latest device and web offerings from that company from Redmond.

What’s the developer community or ecosystem like for Kinect, Surface 2 and Knockout,js in Asia?

We reckon that the developer community for these technologies is still small (with the exception of Kinect) because they are new.  This presents a “greenfield” opportunity for developers keen to build applications on these new technologies as companies look to provide their customers with experiences that delight.  Surface allows for multi-user interaction on a multi-touch (+50 touch points) screen which could be set up as a table or hung on a wall.  This is particularly suitable for certain verticals such as banks, entertainment (bars, etc), and other environments which would encourage users to interact.  Kinect, which allows for hands-free augmented reality experiences would encourage a new set of applications to be developed.  It is now much more than an add-on to Xbox – developers ranging from hobbyists to researchers are leveraging on the power of Kinect to create experiences that go beyond the point-and-click desktop experience.

Knockout.js is basically a Javascript design pattern framework that provides non-web developers a familiar development experience similar to that of desktop application development. This lowers the entry barrier for non-web developers to start learning and developing web applications with Javascript ans also increases their business opportunities as they are now able to extend their reach on the mobile front as currently all mobile browsers supports HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript applications.

What are the opportunities for companies or developers in developing on Mango?

With Mango, developers can build new app experiences for Windows Phone 7– multitasking, augmented reality, real-time communications and messaging apps, better web experience with IE9 on WP7, excellent developer tools which allow developers to run background tasks, run profilers for testing, SL and XNA integration, Sockets for networking, SQL database on WP7, as well as additional APIs which enhance the app experience for the consumer.  From a Marketplace perspective, we are introducing changes to make app updates easier, expanding to more countries, extra Marketplace integration which increases discoverability of the apps.

Book a slot at the workshop with Chris and Thye Yeow now.

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Baidu Promises To Put An End To Its Music Piracy

Recently, led by the Ministry of Culture, China forms the Internet Music Industry Development Consortium which consisted of Internet music operators and Internet music content providers in an effort to promote a healthy copyright environment for the country’s Internet music industry. About 20 companies have joined the association and signed up a protocol to encourage indigenous music products and combat piracy, including Chinese music firms China Record Corporation, Ocean Butterflies Music Co., Internet giants Tencent, Sina, Tudou and Baidu, as well as the three major telecom operators: China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom.

Earlier, Baidu in particular was criticized by Western music companies, Chinese musician Union,and other associations for aiding Chinese web users looking for illegal music content. Baidu will launch its own online music body Ting, which will be offering licensed music albeit only with Chinese copyright holders signing up. Meanwhile, the links of pirated music on Baidu will be cleaned up by the end of June.

Baidu Ting is a new music platform of Baidu which launched its open beta testing version on June 8th. According to Baidu representative Liang Kangni, Baidu Ting currently has already amassed 500,000 songs in storage, and plans to further enlarge it to one million. The songs are mostly purchased from the copyright side by Baidu. The good thing for users is that there are no plans of charging any fees yet.

Currently Baidu Ting is consist of four main columns,Public Square, Radio, Top List and My Ting!, with more personalised and communitilized features.

Related posts:

1. Playing With Baidu Ting, It Offers You Everything But Pirate Music
2. Rumour: No more pirate MP3 – Baidu going to resolve dispute with music companies
3. Baidu Launched Online Music Radio Channel

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PennUp – 17 Jun

Penn Olson, The Asian Tech Catalog, will organize networking session with tech folks in Singapore and around Asia. Volker Heistermann, venture capitalist, and Eric Koh, CTO of Jobscentral are few of guests who will attend this. Beside prominent guests, there will be four startups pitching at this networking session as well. They are Fashion Style Japan by Narita-san, Compath.me by Ando-san, Moso by Murakoshi-san and Cacoo by Tabata-san.

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Guests

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Daniel Goh: Founder and editor at YoungUpStarts.com, a small business, entrepreneurship, and technology blog.

Derek Tan: APAC Director at Cooliris, a silicon valley-based start-up. Its latest product is LiveShare, a real-time photo sharing platform.

Eric Koh: Partner and CTO at JobsCentral. JobsCentral is Singapore’s largest jobs portal and was recently acquired by CareerBuilder.

Rumpelstiltskin (her nickname): A successful serial entrepreneur and start-up mentor at Singapore Management University. She prefers to keep a low profile.

Saumil Nanavati and Bernand Leong: CEO and CTO of Chalkboard, respectively. Chalkboard is a location-based ad platform.

Volker Heistermann: Venture capitalist at Yushan Ventures. He lived in Silicon Valley for 15 years and is now based in Taiwan as an investor.

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Event Details

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When: Friday, 17th June
Time: 630pm-10pm
Where: Tawandang Microbrewery at 1 Raffles Boulevard, Suntec City (Map)
Register here.
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Funzz.com, People Suspect It Is the Facebook China Operated by Baidu

Funzz.com is in public beta. To differentiate from other social networks, Funzz calls itself the new, interest-focus social network.

Obviously, Funzz does not lie about this. When you first log on Funzz, you will be given a list of interests to choose from and the system will then populate a list of users who have the same interests with you. Funzz comes with several major features, Micro BBS, Group, Space, Events and all these clearly focus on one thing, user’s interest. You can interact with other users with the same interests in micro BBS; join a Football-lover’s group; share your interests on your space (profile page) and participate certain event (salon, travel etc).

I would not say Funzz is nice designed and its functions are quite limited right now as well. But it indeed brings some fresh air to the tedium local social networks. Forget about Six-degree theory and it might be time to reshape the social networks from Social Graphs to Interest Graphs.

Funzz is based in Beijing according its About page but its ICP is registered in Guangdong. People feel Funzz is kinda of unique and some of them even suspect Funzz is the rumored Facebook China operated by Baidu. We have no evidence to prove that, but what really caught my eyes and makes me believe Funzz will be special, is the following video produced by Funzz. It’s just too good.

Related posts:

1. Facebook May Partner With Baidu, but Don't be the Next MySpace
2. Chinese Netizen Commented on Facebook Mark Zuckerberg's Visit Baidu
3. Three More Reasons Why Renren Is Not Facebook of China

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Google China Filed For Map License

According to a local report, Google China has filed an application for map license to operate online map service in China through Beijing Guxiang Information Technology Co., a joint venture by Google and Ganji.com.

An anonymous official from China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping disclosed that Google China did applied for the license, and “the application is still in review.”

According to local ruling, all entities that offer online map service in China should obtain a Map License by July 1, 2011; otherwise they’re not allowed to continue with their offerings.

However, obtaining the license may be the least Google China should worry about, because lots of Google China Map Service customers have choose or are about to adopt another service such as Baidu Map. They’re concerned that their business may be hindered if Google China failed in the application.

One technical leader at a Chinese group buy site said that, Google China Map faces uncertainties that will scare away customers. And Wang Xinguang, COO of Lookoo.cn, a Chinese life services site, remarked that even knowing Google has filed for map license, “we still decide to choose another map service because of the unpredictability regarding Google China Map.” Currently there’re thousands of sites using Google China’s map service, including social rating service Dianping.com, LBS sites such as Jiepang.com and Qieke.com and so on.

Related posts:

1. New Deadline for Mapping License, or Google Maps Get Lost in 2011
2. What If Google Map is Out of China, No Worry, deCarta Map is Here
3. Rumor: China To Issue Online Payment License Next Week

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Join the ‘HTML5 Hotness’ workshop at Echelon 2011

Echelon 2011 will have a third track of workshops running alongside the two main tracks that aims to provide a a deeper dive to some topics. These workshops will be conducted by experts on the topic.

Microsoft will be running a session touching on HTML5 with the help of Mingfei, their Developer Evangelist, and a freelance developer, Shi Chuan. The Day 1 noon session will touch on the opportunities that startups and developers can expect from the rise of this open technology. Check out what they have to say about the workshop.

Seats are extremely limited, so book one right now. (You’ll need an Echelon 2011 conference pass to attend, naturally)

Who should attend HTML5 Hotness? What can a startup’s CTO learn from this session? What about a developer?

This session is for anyone who is serious about the present and future of technologies, who looks for high productivity and efficiency. A startup who will make the front-edge product, may want to stay relevant to the newest web standard, which will be supported by most of devices and browsers in the near future. For developers, you may want to get ready for the hottest technological revolution and stay competent in your field.

Weigh in on the Flash vs HTML5 debate.

HTML5 is not made to replace Flash, but any technology that slows down openness and innovation will be replaced (indirectly) by HTML5.

HTML5 will blur the line between web and desktop applications. Google’s Chromebook and Microsoft Windows 8 will fundamentally change the way technology, innovation and creativity work. So Flash is just one of the dozens of technologies HTML5 will replace (indirectly).

HTML5 does not discriminate Flash, HTML5 learned a lot from Flash.

HTML5 was made to promote an open environment where people share their source code, people can copy and learn from each other and benefit the society. Knowledge is not made but discovered, so no one has the privilege to talk about ‘intellectual rights’.

The replacement will be a gradual process because of browser inconsistencies. Certain HTML5 features will still have Flash fall-backs.

Gradually, Flash will lose its market share because more and more people will start to adopt open technologies. But as a HTML5 developer, I still respect the early works done in Flash, but the world has to change, so we have to use better and faster technologies that’s fair to everyone.

What are the opportunities out there for companies and developers working with HTML5? Any interesting case studies to share with us?

There are some interesting cases studies:

1. Newly released Disney Tron Comic Book, using HTML5 2D transformation and Canvas.
2. SVG Girl Japanese animation with canvas.
3. Foursquare Playground with HTML5 Canvas.
4. The world biggest Pac-man game built in HTML5.

There are tons of opportunities in every aspect of the web and desktop:

1. Game development (canvas, webGL): Pirates Love Daisies and Angry Birds
2. multimedia video & audio streaming (audio/video API): Vimeo and YouTube
3. 3D animation & graphic effects (webGL, canvas, SVG).
4. Instant chat (web sockets).
5. Faster web less graphics (semantics, CSS3).
6. Mobile, location based services, offline reading (offline storage, geolocation API).
7. Better performance integration.

Book a slot at the workshop with Mingfei and Shi Chuan now.

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Remember Government’s $35 Tablet? Launches This June [Will Cost Rs. 2,200/]

Remember the $35 tablet from Indian government? The project has gone through its own yo-yo cycle with government canceling the tender and delaying the project by more than 6 months.

The good news is that there is a light at the end of this tunnel and early this month, government announced that 10,000 (Sakshat) tablet will be delivered to IIT-Rajasthan in late June and over the next four months 90,000 more would be made available at a price of Rs 2,200/device.

Government will subsidize the cost by 50%, so a student would have to pay only Rs. 1,100/ for the device (though it’s hard to believe that the actual cost price of device is only Rs. 2,200/).

Features

• 7 ‘’ Touch-screen
• 2 USB ports
• 32GB HD
• 2 GB RAM
• Video-conferencing facility
• Multimedia content

Like we said earlier, we are ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the device and we certainly hope that this project lives up to its expectation.

If executed well, this can drastically change the way education is imparted and importantly, open up plethora of possibilities for startups/technology companies to build products around the education ecosystem.

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