Two Months of Menoo!: 100,000 Downloads and 15,000 Unique Users

With around 260,000 Points of Interest (POI) food places and more than two million menu across Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and America, this Location-Based Service (LBS) social culinary app, Menoo!, has gained a lot of attentions from foodies. The app itself has been utilizing the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) 6 platform to enable its users to share and connect with each other using BBM.

Apart from the countries mentioned above, Menoo! are also in the midst of negotiating with a number of potential  local partners in several countries such as India, Philippines and Venezuela. Menoo! has a special focus on Thailand and Japan where the apps are being localized into the native languages.

Integrated with maps such as Google Maps and BlackBerry Map, it makes it easier to choose “What’s your Menoo! today?” and gives directions to the food place that users are looking for. Users can also find information about the place, price and menu list of each restaurant. For example, Pizza Hut Delivery’s (PHD) promotional information and special offers. “In the future, as Menoo! social culinary application improves and develops even more, our customers will be able to make their order through Menoo!,” mentioned Riri Hassan, PHD Marketing Manager.

PHD, Haagen Dazs, Rolling Stone Café Indonesia, Hard Rock Café Indonesia, Kopitiam Oey, Pizza Bar, Café & Co, Umaku Sushi, Q Smoke House Barbeque Restaurant, Decanter Wine House, Han Gang, Grand Suki, My Pancake, White Hunter are several big merchants, some of them international brands, that have partnered with Menoo!. and more to come. The list is growing as Menoo! looks for new partnerships to offer users with exclusive promotions and discounts through its app. Working with partner merchants, Menoo! will be introducing the concept of instant redeemable mobile coupon in its next release.

“Jalansutra is very lucky to be able to work with Menoo! because Menoo! helps culinary lovers pick and find both food and restaurant references that they want and also provides them with various promotion programs in this mobile application,” Harry Nazaruddin, Jalansutra Community committee said in the press release.

Recently, Menoo! has received additional support from two countries, InSing from Singapore and Compas Point from Thailand.

“Support given to Menoo! reflects the public’s need to find places to network with hassle free effort. This is why we are committed to keep on innovating and expanding our network to other countries so that Menoo! could be the top of mind and the guide in searching for culinary information,” said Calvin, CEO of PT. Elasitas Multi Kreasi.

“In Indonesia only, we have just reached the 100,000 downloads milestone last week and more than 15,000 unique users. We haven’t put any effort at all to promote Menoo! in countries outside of Indonesia, thus, the numbers we got for those countries are not significant, but surely growing. Thanks to word-of-mouth and good user feedbacks and of course, thanks to all the support from the merchants,” as he explains to e27.

Meanwhile, the iOS app is waiting for Apple’s approval for the App Store and will be available for download soon. New versions with enhanced user experience is being planned to be rolled out in the next two weeks.

Link to full article

Read More

New app lets you buy pet food while walking your dog

If you’re too lazy or busy to head down to the pet store to get puppy chow for your pet Shih Tzu, then SingPet‘s new app may just suit you. While online pet shops are dime a dozen in Singapore — see Doggy Friend, Paw Family, Pet’s Gourmet, and Pawpawsg — SingPet is probably the first one to innovate with an mobile app.

The company has been around since 1998 and claims to have served over 500,000 customers globally. So at the very least, they deserve some applause for making a substantial technological leap from the days of yore.

While SingPet could have just created a run-of-the-mill app, they’ve done the right thing by adding some nifty features to make it a more worthy download. The basics are covered: The app lets you browse items for a variety of pets — cats, fish, dogs, birds — and add the desired items to a shopping cart. After that, you can purchase the items via PayPal or Direct Deposit.

But where the app shines is in the extra features. If you’ve purchased tuna-flavored cat food from the SingPet app once, you won’t have to browse the store to locate the same item again — previous purchases will be displayed for one-touch reordering.

Alternatively, the app lets you scan the barcode on your favorite product, which will then be delivered to you. Other important features like loyalty point tracking and promotion code input round up the app.

Meh.

Double meh.

If we have one gripe about the app though, it would be the design. While the homepage is cute and colorful, the rest of the app interface looks atrocious. There’s no design consistency — it feels like two different apps mashed into one.

Imagine yourself entering a physical pet shop with a nice storefront. But when you’re inside, it’s just grey walls and concrete  – which looks depressing. That’s what the app sorta feels like.

In contrast, a fine example of wonderful app design would be buUuk’s WeatherLah, which is not only useful, but also looks clean, simple, and gorgeous.

So while we applaud SingPet’s efforts, the app still has much room for improvement (actually, their website is also due for a revamp).

WeatherLah app: Now that's more like it.

Link to full article

Read More

Innovation Works To Operate Shanghai Branch Next Year

Innovation Works, the Chinese startup boot camp is extending tentacles beyond Beijing with the announcement of its Shanghai branch (target to operate starting Jan, 2012) and the set up of its Shanghai Fund that aimed to raise RMB2b (US$31m).

The China’s YCombinator has invested in 34 startup projects/companies while 9 of which have closed their Series A funding.

IW has just finished raising its first US dollar fund of 180 million from WI Harper Group, Sequoia Capital, IDG, silicon valley god-father Ron Conway, well-known Russian investor Yuri Milner among other angel investors.

 

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

1. Innovation Works Closes First Internet-Focused Fund of US$180 Million
2. Guess Who Else Invested In Innovation Works? HTC, DST, Ron Conway and Mayor Bloomberg
3. Russia's DST invested US$500 million in 360buy

Link to full article

Read More

Collage apps face off!

Because I am someone who likes to take multiple shots, I always end up with a lot of pictures in my photo album. For people like me who are constantly looking for an app to organize pictures in an easy and convenient way, Pic collage can do the trick. Developed by Cardinal Blue and marketed as “A fun and simple way to create your own photo collages”, pic collage has quite a reputation for itself and is rated one of the top 10 photography app on iTunes.

The good:

• Pic collage is a really simple app that anyone can use and is idiot proof. The command is pretty straight forward:
• Tap to add photos
• Resize each photo by stretching or pinching them
• Rotate them with two fingers
• Delete photo with a simple flick

The bad:

• Unable to choose the Background colour. You can manually change the colour of the background by creating new collages which randomly assign a new background colour for you, but the fact remains that you cant choose the colour of the background. Needs more background colour.
• It would be nice if I could add text to it.
• New feature that allows you to add a border to the collage would be nice as well.
• Apparently you cant add more than 15 photos in one collage.
• Pic collage should provide collage templates for users who are lacking in artistic sense like me, but I guess for a free app, that could be a little bit too much to ask.

Verdict: Not Bad. I’ll use it once in a while for now. Highly recommended for those who are looking for a free app to organize your photos into a photo collage in a fast but fun way.

In case you missed it, Cardinal Blue was one of Echelon 2011′s Launchpad startups and was accepted into Dave McClure’s 500 Startups accelerator program.

Of course, there are similar apps which also aim to help users organize their cluttered photos, and one such app is Shape Collage. Shape collage has been around for quite some time since 2007 but their iOS app was only available in recent years. What Shape Collage can do is it allows you to choose the pictures and allow the app to convert them into collages of various shapes. Currently the app allows you to make collages in the a rectangular shape, heart shape (kinky!), circular, moon or even into text.

The good:

• Allows you to convert your photos into fun-shaped collage
• Easy to use
• The app helps you to organize your photos
• “A seriously fun photo collage app” – Lifehacker
• Various shapes are provided and with a few clicks, the chosen photos are organized into a photo collage. Good for people lacking in artistic sense like me.

The bad:

• You cannot decide the arrangement and alignment of the photos on the collage (the web version allows you to do this)
• Would really be nice if the photos on the shape collage can be adjusted or reshaped manually.

Verdict: Shape collage is really fun! Highly recommended for users who wants to make shape collages.

Personally I would prefer Shape Collage over Pic Collage because one, the fun factor, and two, organizing the photos in Pic Collage proved to be a much more hassle to me because no matter how I organize my photos, it just didn’t feel right. Here’s my attempt (using similar photos) in creating a photo collage using Pic Collage (top) and Shape Collage (bottom):

So, which one do you prefer? Pic Collage or Shape Collage?

Link to full article

Read More

Mobage’s Flagship Game Kaitou Royal Goes On TV Drama

MyCom reported [J] that Kaitou Royal, a popular social game on which you play heroic bandits, has been being offered on the one of two major social game platform Mobage by DeNA, will be dramatized for TV next month October.

Like as in the original game, there are three flavors of characters, each of who has strength on power, smartness and beauty. On this drama, a smart character will be assigned to an actor Toori Matsuzaka, who played Shinken Red, a leader of Shinkenjers, the 33rd series of Super Sentai Series, also known under the name of Power Rengers in other countries.

photo credit: TV Asahi

Backed by huge number of players and popularity, the vision of the game had been expanded into novel, then comics on major manga magazines.

See Also:

The First Twitter Drama Starts In April In Japan - 2010 Spring

Mobage’s Flagship Game Kaitou Royal Goes On TV Drama

Link to full article

Read More

Servcorp Business Shorts with Anthony Coundouris – 15 Sep

Servcorp Business Shorts in Singapore will welcome Anthony Coundouris of Futurebooks. He will give a speech entitled “Why it pays SMEs to keep their head in the clouds”. This is a critical discussion about how a business can make most of cloud computing services offered by Google, Microsoft, Dropbox and leverage new types of outsourcing. Servcorp Business Shorts is a free quarterly event in which we invite guest speakers and professionals who are willing to share their experiences with like-minded business professionals.

---

About the Speaker

---

Anthony is the founder of Futurebooks, offering affordable bookkeeping, business planning and business brokering to start-up companies. He has a decade of experience in marketing. Collectively he has helped dozens of corporate firms build subscription models and develop online positioning, including Caltex, Jaguar, SAS, ING Direct, FoxTel, salesforce.com, Telstra, Proctor and Gamble, Google, Kraft, Citibank and American Express. He was founder of Firestarter, a digital marketing agency, acquired by Novus Media in 2010.

 

---

Event Details

---

When: Thursday, 15th September 2011
Time: 545pm-8pm
Where: Level 30 Six Battery Road Singapore 049909 (Map)
Interested participants can send an email to offices@servcorp.com.sg or call 6818 600 for RSVP by 10th Sep.

 

Link to full article

Read More

Benchmark Your Social Media Efforts With UnMetric

What’s important – Your Facebook fan base or engagement? Your Twitter followers or number of Retweets?

Social media gurus have hyped up the numbers ensuring that brands get into the number trap and in the process, spend $$s without getting any real benefit.

Time and again, people have asked whether there a RoI in social media or not? But before we answer that question, an important aspect to understand is whether there is a way to benchmark one’s social media activities against competition/industry? Unless you benchmark, you cannot measure and hence, cannot calculate RoI.

For example, it’s very difficult to answer whether growing Facebook fanbase by 20% every month is a good data point or not? A lot depends on your industry category and frankly, whether your current fanbase is engaged enough or not!

Most brands are flying blind on social media. The absence of relative benchmarks so far has proved a detriment to big brands who are used to competitive benchmarking and intelligence on other media.

Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company (Chennai based startup) aims to solve this dilemma with its newly launched tool (currently in private beta).

Besides comparing the performance of competing brands, Unmetric also benchmarks brands against their sector so they know if they are “on par”. The web application captures everything that matters, including fan and follower growth, fan profiles, response times, timing and insights into content strategies – and offers actionable insights.

Having said that, currently UnMetric is limited to brands they are monitoring and if you want to get your brand added, you need to request for the same.

Check out some of the comparison I did using UnMetric in the last few hours.

—

Telecom Operators : How Active Are They In Social Media

I compared Airtel, Aircel, Tata DoCoMo, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone and here is the result:

Telecom Operators And Facebook Fans

Tata DoCoMo has the highest fanbase – but does that translate into engagement?

Indian Telecom Operators And Engagement

Airtel rules when it comes to engagement and interesting that a lot of posts (on Facebook wall) happens from Airtel fans (vs. page admin), as opposed to other brands.

But are these compaints about Airtel’s QoS (Quality of Service)? Well, take a look at sentimental analysis of the brands.

Telecom Operators In India - Sentiments

That is, Airtel India also leads the negative sentiment race, though Virgin Mobile India (which seems silent in its social media activities) leads the positive sentiments among other operators.

–

Enfield Vs. Bajaj

So you expected Enfield fans to be super active in social media? Check this.

 

Enfield Vs. Bajaj

UnMetric essentially brings a set of context to data and is a great tool to measure one’s social media efforts (in comparison with competitors/industry). Right now, you can track 5 brands and the team sends out alerts if there are unusual activities happening in a brand page (for example, if there is an increased engagement/FB likes/comments etc).

However, social media is just not limited to Facebook/Twitter (what about blogs?), but eventually find a way in these channels (all blogs do have a presence on Twitter/FB). Unmetric doesn’t analyzes blogs owing to its target segment. That is, UnMetric team is focused more on helping a marketer understand the RoI (of their social media efforts)/benchmarking and less on brand’s analytics.

And that’s where lies the difference with several other SMM analytical tools present in the market (Buzzgain was one of such tools and was acquired by US based Meltwater).

Overall, UnMetric is a damn interesting startup to watch out for – they are solving a real need in the market, though the challenge lies in selling the service to US customers and creating brand awareness. Having said that, the least that they can do is to publish market reports and tie up with mainstream media companies for supplying them these brand analytics.

What’s your opinion? Tomorrow, we will share an interview with the team and their past experience (hint:UnPluggd).

Link to full article

Read More

InfoEdge To Invest $4.5mn in MeritNation

Info Edge (India) Ltd has informed BSE that the Company proposes to invest an additional amount of Rs. 200 million ($4.5mn) through a mix of equity and convertible preference shares in Applect Learning Systems Private Limited, i.e. meritnation.com (they earlier invested Rs. 115 million/$2.5mn in Meritnation earlier).

Meritnation offers online education and assessment business and sells CBSE, ICSE and State Board courses online.

InfoEdge’s other investment includes 99labels, Nogle Technologies, MyDala, PolicyBazaar and today announced investing $3 Million in Zomato, the online food and restaurant directory.

Link to full article

Read More