Tomorrow night, Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) will organize a networking session. It is an opportunity for participants to mingle around with MDA Expert Panellists, SiTF’s members, mentors and incubatees.
Event Details
When: Friday, 9th September 2011
Time: 6pm-9pm
Where: Toucan Irish Pub, 15 Duxton Hill, Singapore 089598 (Map)
Register here.
Want to snap photos at clubs, trips, parties, company outings, media gatherings, get-togethers and other experiences with friends, colleague, relatives and family, upload it directly with multiple cameras and see them all in one place through web or apps? LiveShare from Cooliris is the answer to that. In addition, users can create photo groups on the fly, make them private or public, see them flow into their group photo streams in real-time while others can view, comment and add photos. No need to search through emails, social networks, and photo sites to see each other’s photos. It is integrated with popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well. Invitations can be sent via email or SMS. There is no limit set up for photo hosting and users can enjoy this rich features app for free.
US-based company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Cooliris, Inc. is a venture-backed company with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, The Westly Group, and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture as their investors. The company also has a satellite office in Singapore. Focusing on developing consumer apps with immersive, intuitive and personal experiences in creating, sharing and discovering contents, Cooliris 3D Wall and Discover for iPad are their leading apps launched so far.
On August 12, Cooliris exclusively partners up with Elasitas Technologies to make LiveShare available to Indonesians with localized content. “We decided to partner up with Cooliris because we believe Indonesians will benefit from this application immensely,” says Calvin, CEO of Elastias in the press release. “Indonesia has one of the top market shares when it comes to social network usage—and LiveShare will make socializing that much more personal and fun.” he adds.
“We need to be orientated in the Indonesian market and having a local partner will definitely help us. With the strong social atmosphere in Indonesia, and seeing the gaps in contextual rich media communication today, we hope to bring and grow LiveShare in Indonesia and take this growth to markets in the region too. With the partnership, we will be able to work with not just operators, but brands or celebrities as well to build awareness and ultimately used in their campaigns that target end users. This is also triggered from Elasitas’ connection with the media companies, brands and now retail brands in Indonesia.” That is where the partnership with Elasitas comes in as explained by Derek Tan, Cooliris APAC Head of Business Development.
Even though their numbers in Indonesia is small at this point of time, Cooliris believes that there are great opportunities to increase visibility of LiveShare with Indonesians. “We are not going for the mass yet as we are not only on smartphones. But understanding the increase of Android users in the region and the strategies that operators and OEMs will place, we want to be there early to grow a user base.” as he states to e27.
Beyond personal usage, it creates a great opportunity for brand owners and public personalities to campaign for their cause and products by way of viral and mobile/online campaigns, such as ESPN STAR Sports, NASCAR, KIA X Games Asia, KISS, Ozzy Osborne, Michael Buble, Paris Hilton, MediaCorp, Channel News Asia, StarHub and SMART. Brand owners and public personalities will have great exposure to LiveShare four million active users both online and on mobile.
Currently, the app is available on iOS Devices, Android and Windows Phone 7 as well as on the web. With a strong lineup of features in development right now, we can expect to see more updates from Cooliris for existing and possibly new platforms.
Check out the demo video of LiveShare here.
Here are some interesting startup news from South Korea, not only in its capital, Seoul, but also other startup hubs such as Busan, Incheon, Ulsan and many more. These stories are taken from our partner, onsuccess, a website on start-ups and entrepreneurship in South Korea.
(1) Kakao Corporation, a Korean mobile messenger company, managed to secure 20.6bn Korean won (US$20m) of investment from five foreign and domestic companies on 29th of August. According to Kakao, the invested money would be used for targeting foreign markets.
(2) With Moglue, user can create, preview, and publish interactive eBooks using user-favorite fantasy characters. User can even release them as apps for iOS and Android devices with one-click publishing.
(3) Blogcocktail, a local fixture in the domestic blog industry, has launched a new food photo and review sharing app: Dofork.
(4) In an attempt to stand out amongst the crowd of similar looking social networking sites (SNS), Userstory Lab, a Seoul-based company, has designed a set of social applications and tools that provide multiple services under one roof, interconnected via a universal login.
(5) ONOFFMIX is hailed as one of the most promising Korean startups in recent times. With the aim of improving the user’s personal and social life, ONOFFMIX helps in organizing and promoting a wide variety of meetings and events among like-minded people via the Internet.
(6) Koreaboo is an English news portal that provides the latest news and gossip surrounding the Korean pop (K-pop) industry. Mostly catering to the requirements of its English speaking fans, Koreaboo reports up-to-the-minute gossip and news from the K-pop world such as celebrity lifestyle, music, movies, and drama.
(7) Using the Smart Ranking application, user can see the daily rankings of iPhone and iPad applications from 37 countries. The rankings are sorted by categories such as country, free, paid, and grossing.
(8) Crossfire, a Korean FPS (First-person shooter) video game, recorded an unprecedented amount of total users. According to an August standard survey, Crossfire was connected to more than 3 million Chinese concurrent users, the Neowiz Games announced on 1st September.
This has been brought to you by SGE and Onsuccess. Onsuccess is a media enterprise for start-ups and ventures in Korea. Onsuccess introduces innovative Korean start-ups and ventures to people overseas through media partners and inspires readers by sharing interesting business ideas and trends from all over the world. Furthermore, Onsuccess holds various events, offering actual chances for Korean start-ups and ventures to meet other start-ups, venture business partners and investors abroad. They publish in both Korean and English.
We thank nordicfactory for the flag image.
We did a roundup about Chinese liker/copies of Tumblr last month, but certainly, the love to Tumblr has not come to the end. Three new players are now in the market, including the leading Chinese social network, RenRen, the leading portal NetEase and a startup.
RenRen Xiaozhan (xiaozhan.renren.com) was launched yesterday. You can use your RenRen account to login and the content (image, video, music etc) you published on Xiaozhan can be synced back to your RenRen profile page.
Lofter.com, the rumored Netease’s Tumblr is now confirmed. It’s now at private test stage and we don’t know how much it’s like Tumblr. But judging by its main page, it’s very nicely designed and I love that promotion video too.
Mibuo.com is launched by a Shenzhen-based company. The most interesting part is that it allows users to login with Fanfou’s account. Fanfou is one of the earliest copy of Twitter launched by Wang Xin who is now the founder of Meituan. But be honest, I don’t even remember my Fanfou’s account and password.
Xu Chaojun, CEO of Diandian gave a nice description and comparison about Weibo, Blog and Lite-Weibo (Tumblr). He said,
If Blog is a Book, then Weibo is the Daily Newspaper, and Lite-Weibo is the Magazine.
It indeed makes sense, but how many magazines do you actually read? I only read IT-related magazines and definitely I am only interested in at most 1-2 magazines every month.
Related posts:
Never fret about not knowing what to cook for your family or yourself for the next meal!
The new application, Healthy Chef, that is published by Codigo Pte Ltd for the Health Promotion Board of Singapore aims to provide over 70 healthier recipes by renowned chefs in Singapore. It is available on iOS and more recently on Windows Phone 7 platform.
I downloaded the app to try it out. Read on for my review on this app.
Upon opening the app, I am greeted with a cute logo with the name of the app clearly written before the program loads onto the screen. I am delighted with the graphics that fades in and out in the background of the main screen that has their recipes searchable under clear categories such as “budget (under $5)”, “cruisine”, “calories” and a general “search” and “all recipes” option. There is no mistaking the collaboration with the Health Promotion Board of Singapore as the logo is prominently displayed together with the “Healthier Choice” logo.
For a start, I wanted to check out the types of cruisine that they offer. 4 main categories are available including “Chinese”, “Malay”, “Indian” and “Western”. Selecting “Chinese”, I see a whole listing of all available recipes laid out in a list format with the name of the dish and the calories per serving listed. There is another view that is available which only shows the mouth-watering pictures of the food in tile format. Randomly choosing a dish “Beancurd with Chilli Bean Sauce” brings me to another page that shows me the breakdown of the nutritient value. There, I am given the option to rate the recipe, choose to prepare it, adding it to favourites for future reference and even share it via Facebook or Email (with preloaded text that can be edited). The ingredients and method of preparation are listed separately.
One feature that I was particularly excited by is the option for me to choose a recipe and enter it into a diary with the serving size expected. This way I can easily plan meals in advance. Another thing to note is the “shopping list” feature. Once a recipe is entered into the diary, the ingredients are automatically added to the shopping list. You can check off the items as you shop in the supermarket and the advisory for healthier choice products are also clearly reflected.
Though the experience is great, there are still some points that I felt were missing. For one, when entering a recipe into the diary, I am made to pick out a date. The absence of a calender view might hamper me from finding a date that is further in the future. Should I have a dinner planned for a friend who is arriving in 2 weeks time, I would have to be absolutely sure of the date and meticulously click though to get to the desired date. Another point would be the rating of the recipes. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to rate a recipe properly. I could not tap accurately to reflect the star rating because it was too small (the app does not allow multi-touch zoom function). I wondered whether I was supposed to slide across the stars but it did not work either. Also, there seems to be a bug in the diary view as I am unable to view specific recipes by directly selecting them from there. Scrolling between days was also problematic. Finally, it would also be really helpful if the shopping list was colour coded to reflect which ingredients were for which dish so that selective shopping could be done.
Overall, I am delighted with the asthetically pleasing graphics and the ease of use of the interface. It is easy to search for recipes and navigating around the app is a piece of cake. Cook away!
The Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA) of Japan has released a set of statistics on Japan's mobile market today, showing that the country had 122.44 million cell phone subscribers last month (out of a total population of 128 million). According to the organization, Japan's carriers added 569,200 new customers between July and August.
Breaking down the number to individual carriers, the TCA said that:
According to Wikipedia (which uses slightly outdated numbers for some countries), these statistics make Japan the seventh largest mobile market in the world.
Mobile Subscribers In Japan: The Latest Numbers
Navteq has announced the availability of new visual content for its NAVTEQ map for India. This content includes Motorway Junction Objects, Sign-as-Real and 3D Landmarks, for the top eight cities in India.
The latest commercially released version of the map is available for more than 2000 cities throughout India with 1.15 million km of road networks.
Here is an interview we did (in December 2010) with Marc Naddell, VP (Developer Programs, Navteq) about the India opportunity and tie-ups.
Navteq: The India Opportunity
There is no better way to GTD (Getting Things Done) than by involving your friends to help you with the task.
SAAS based Project management startup, DeskAway has launched Social Tasks that lets you share your tasks from your Task list with your friends on Facebook and your followers on Twitter.
That is, you can now simply ask your followers on Twitter/ friends on Facebook to provide feedback on your current task (be it design/coding etc).
To share the task click ‘Share’ and choose your Social network. The system will generate a short URL and redirect you to ‘Tweet’ page on Twitter or ‘Share Link on Facebook’ depending on the social network you select. The shortened URL will lead people back to the Social Task page on DeskAway. People wanting to leave a comment will need to login either via Twitter or Facebook. After a successful authentication, the user will be redirected back to the Social Task page, where the user can add comments to your task. (via)
The last step, i.e. leading people back to social task page doesn’t appeal so much, as its just a quick feedback that people want to share with others and bringing logging page simply creates an entry barrier to use the service (ideally, they could have just fetched the replies from Tw/Fb, but technically that’s an API nightmare).
Having said that, the beauty of such features is that they help increase the reach and awareness of your product, without any marketing overhead.
What’s your take?
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Guest posts by Sahil Parikh, DeskAway founder:
Recommended List: Web based Project Management Software – THE Grand List
Buying a home ain’t that easy, but the more difficult task is to track the payment schedule/builder progress etc. HomeBuy360 is a Bangalore based startup that wants to solve the process madness in real estate industry with the launch of products meant for property buyers as well as builders.
HomeBuy360 is built as a CRM tool for builders, some of the features of the product are:
Essentially, a one-stop shop for builders to track projects and manage buyer relationship.
Started by ex-Infoscians, HomeBuy360 is monetized via Pay-per-use model.
Pricing models vary from pay as you sell, pay over time, per project to one time annual charge etc. We encourage builders can charge back the fees they pay us to their buyers given the value created and provided to buyers through the online login. This essentially means, builders can use the application for free by transferring our fees to the buyers.[Kshitiz Minglani, Founder].
Homefind360 – the consumer portal
In order to complete the loop, the startup has launched Homefind360, which is basically a search site for one to find real estate properties (limited to ones registered on the site).
As far as business model is concerned, HomeBuy360 doesn’t want to charge builders for the service. The whole concept is to build it like a search service (including free text search), where builders can add their property details for free and the service is monetized via ads (including Pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, banner ads etc).
Founder Kshitiz also shares that they plan to sell site inventory based on query keywords, which seems like a suboptimal approach to me (real estate property search should not be equated with local search inventory). Moreover, it takes a while to build traffic to the site and so far, the site is missing some of the basic rules of SEO.
Most importantly, if homefind360 wants to be the consumer portal, they need to bring data across all the builders and not just the ones who are part of their system (i.e. be the ‘Google’ and not ‘Justdial’). This is the least, a consumer will expect from a search property.
Also, as part of the site network, a stand alone property for buyers to manage builder relationship (irrespective of whether the builder is part of H360 network or not) will add a lot of value and help the startup seed a WoM marketing for the product.
Overall, a service like this is much needed in the market and homebuy360 is an interesting startup to watch out for. In its current form, I believe they have launched too many products and would sincerely advise the team to consider bringing everything under one roof (though separate brands).
What’s your take? Do give homefind360 and homebuy360 a spin and share your opinion.
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Also see: Mumbai Based grtDeal Brings Group Buying To Real Estate Business
Aside, 100nests, a startup we profiled 2 years back has shut down its real estate business.
The composite cylinder being translucent, the level of LPG present would be visible in these cylinders, thereby improving customer’s satisfaction about the quantity of LPG contained in cylinders. Handling of these cylinders would be easier as they will be lighter in weight than steel cylinders.
The fibre glass cylinders are in use in different countries and are found to be as safe as steel cylinders and there is no compromise on safety. The cylinders are proposed to be put into circulation only after due approval of Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organization.[source]
BIG Digital to offer 92.7 BIG FM live to Airtel subscribers
BIG Digital will roll out a new opportunity for Airtel subscribers by giving them 92.7 BIG FM on-the-move in whichever region of the country they are located. What this basically means is that if you are a Tamilian based in Mumbai you can listen to 92.7 BIG FM Chennai on your Airtel mobile sitting here. This service will be available across all the circles of Airtel.[source]
Netmagic launches data centre in Noida
Managed IT hosting services firm Netmagic Solutions has launched a 40,000 sq ft data centre in Noida to offer enterprise customers in and around Delhi NCR ‘Managed Hosting Services’. This is the seventh data centre in the country for Netmagic Solutions.
Vodafone Launches Facebook Phone
Vodafone Blue, largely meant for emerging markets, is priced at Rs 4,950 and expects to tap into the youth segment. It will come with unlimited access of Facebook for a year. Vodafone will retail the handset across 4,000 outlets in the country. The telco said it will look to upgrade the phone by offering regional language options and localized content, a must to penetrate the Indian market, along with 3G and WiFi in the next 12-18 months.[source]
- Essentially, its all about packaging and appealing to the youth segment. Given that India’s replacement market is huge, expect a good uptake of such devices, as long as they are sold at an affordable price (and compete with others in terms of features).