Silicon Dragon Second @ NASDAQ

Following are my remarks by journalist entrepreneur and author Rebecca Fannin at NASDAQ, Sept. 8, 2011, the day her group Silicon Dragon rang the closing bell. It was a tribute to the Chinese entrepreneurs in this growing Dragon community who have taken their startups public in the U.S.

I’m very excited to be here today at NASDAQ with so many friends, colleagues and members of the fast-growing Silicon Dragon community. Thanks to NASDAQ and to Sidley Austin for your partnership and for making Sept. 8 a special day we can long remember – and not just because 8 is lucky in China.
Standing here today and getting ready to ring the closing bell gives me have a sense of what it is like for those Chinese entrepreneurs I’ve covered to actually go public on NASDAQ. I’m thinking of Robin Li who took Baidu public here in 2005 and then posed in front of that big NASDAQ neon sign at this Times Square headquarters. Robin is now one of China’s billionaires as the head of China’s search engine. And I’m thinking of Gary Wang of Tudou who went public here a few weeks ago and rang the closing bell. I recall interviewing Gary for the first time in Shanghai in 2006 when his video sharing site was new and picking up its first financing from venture investors. And yes, I’m thinking of Joe Chen of Renren, China’s Facebook-plus, who is now busily running a public company. Standing here on stage with me is David Chao of DCM who was an early backer of Joe’s startup and who was with Joe on stage when Renren went public this past May.
While Silicon Dragon is not about to go public any time soon -- well, who knows? Maybe someday we might! I do get inspired by the entrepreneurs I interview and profile! What we have done is play our part in documenting the historic rise of China’s entrepreneurs and their coming out party internationally. And we have helped to create a community linked across borders – from Beijing and Shanghai to Silicon Valley – by having gatherings such as the one we will have at 5pm today here for experts to exchange ideas and hopefully benefit from the learning.
While investing in China hasn’t really hit Main Street yet in my hometown of Lancaster, Ohio, (hi, Mom!), it’s no longer considered so foreign or even so risky – despite some recent accounting scandals we’ve read about in the press with U.S.-listed China companies and controversial reverse mergers. I know some here in the audience who have profited from well-timed buys and sells of shares Chinese companies that were financed by Sand Hill Road’s venture elite. So it is possible to get solid returns that can match those from US companies.
As a journalist and an author profiling China’s entrepreneurial leaders and up and comers, it wouldn’t be right for me to invest in those companies I cover. Sure, I have my favorites. It’s based on instinct and impressions of the founders themselves as well as hard-won access to the inner workings of their startup strategies.
I’m glad I’ve had this opportunity to be one of the few journalists documenting this unfolding story of China’s advances from ‘made in China to invented in China’ – the theme of my first book, Silicon Dragon. As I say this, my second book is off to the printers. Book 2, Startup Asia, takes the China story into India, Vietnam and other Asian hotspots and profiles the next generation of Asian entrepreneurs who stand a chance of ringing the closing bell.
This is work I love to do and do naturally, with no boss telling to me what to do (I am my own worst boss) something I’m sure all the entrepreneurs I’ve come to know in China, India and beyond could relate to and then some.
To quote one of the more famous Chinese entrepreneurs I’ve written about -- Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who is now a billionaire from taking his Chinese startup public – “when I am myself, I am happy and have a good result.”
That rings true. Let’s all celebrate by ringing the bell!

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KDDI Buys 15% Stake In French AR Company Total Immersion

Japan's second biggest telecommunications firm KDDI announced [JP] it has acquired an equity stake in French based Total Immersion S.A., an augmented reality (AR) software maker. Business daily The Nikkei says it has learned KDDI paid 100 million yen (US$1.3 million) for a 15% interest in the company.

Total Immersion has offices in North America, Europe, and Asia (their Japan office is located in Tokyo). The company was founded in 1999 and received US$5.5 million in funding from Intel and others back in March this year.

(So according to The Nikkei, Total Immersion's valuation can be estimated to be somewhere around US$8.7 million, while TechCrunch reports that (before the money from Japan), the company collected US$11 million from investors over the years.)

In any case, KDDI says they are especially interested in using Total Immersion's core technology, the so-called D'Fusion AR software platform, for smartphones. Subscribers can expect the first content based on D'Fusion to be rolled out in December (the picture below shows D'Fusion Mobile used as a marketing tool).

KDDI has also invested in Tokyo-based AR startup Tonchidot last year.

KDDI Buys 15% Stake In French AR Company Total Immersion

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“Hiring Was Easy After We Open-sourced Our Code” [ERPNext, Open Source ERP Solution]

We earlier profiled iWebNotes, a Mumbai based SAAS based ERP Solution for SMEs and the team has just shared with us that they have decided to open source the entire application (Github). Apart from changing the brand name to ERPNext, the team shares interesting perspective with us on the decision to open source the code and benefit post-this-decision.

Decision to move to Open Source:

We have always been an Open Source shop and our Google Code repository dates back to October 2009. Recently though we have moved to Github (https://github.com/webnotes). The why was never really a question. Keeping the altruism aside, since there were so many ERP players, it was also a way to stand apart. I realized there is a scope for a modern Open Source ERP and never looked back.

Though we have had minimal contribution from the community as far as code is concerned, there are a number of intangible benefits:

1. We get great technical advice: We have around 50 people on our technical mailing list and some of the best suggestions have come from the community. This is advice we would have never got if our code was not open.

2. You can’t hide anything: If you are developing you own code, there are bound to be many dark areas. Parts of your code that work okay but is a nightmare to maintain. Once the code is open, the very fact that other people might see this code makes you keep it clean and re-factored. It also gives you incentive to comment it and document it.

3. Customers have an option: If you use the SAAS of some of the big companies like SalesForce or basecamp, there is really no exit. Here, the customers have a security that they can move anytime to on-premise hosting. So the fear of lock-in is reduced.

4. Hiring: Our last 3 team-mates have joined us because they were able to see our work more clearly. For startups, hiring is a big problem because we can never match the glamour of an Infosys or IBM or Google. But lately a lot of good programmers are moving towards Open Source and freelancing and this is where we benefit.

5. Good-will: Open Source also generates a lot of goodwill among the customers and general public, because at the end, you are contributing something to the community. The work may seem bad at first, but there are some people will benefit from it. 

6. Distributed Development: Open Source development encourages you to document everything communicate in writing. This enables the team to be geographically anywhere and still keep up-to speed, a skill / culture we would have not developed if we were not Open Source

Product Features:

Our product is designed for small and medium businesses (SMBs) in Manufacturing, Distribution, Retail and Services. We have a full stack of modules from Accounting, Inventory, CRM, Payroll, Support, Projects and more and customers vary from single user to 50 cr companies. 

The product is also very flexible and companies from countries as diverse as the United States, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Malaysia, East Europe and of-course India are using our product.

We also have very rich set of features (you can do multiple Payments across multiple Invoices) and many advanced Inventory management features like Serialized Inventory and Batch Inventory. Our accounting features includes Cost Centers and Budgeting apart from the regular tax reports and Payables and Receivables.

You can also set rules, like restrict users not to pass transactions more than a certain amount, by roles, credit rating etc. We also support field-level permission setting. 

Though the product is still not ready for the general public, we welcome early adopters to give it a spin and I am sure they will be pleasantly surprised.

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What’s your take on the startups’ decision to open source its product and the benefit post this decision?

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ASME Business Symposium 2011 – 29 Sep

The ASME Business Sympossium 2011 will present ample opportunities and assistance schemes to help businesses grow in the midst of a competitive environment for SMEs. The Symposium will cover wide ranging business topics like Productivity Management, Corporate Taxation, Finance, Legal, Human Resource, Learning & Development and Information Technology. Attendees can direct their enquiries at the various Partner Booths.

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Event Details

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When: Thursday, 29th September 2011
Time: 830am-5pm
Where: Marina Mandarin Singapore, Ballroom at Level 1 (Map)
Register here by 16th Sep.

 

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Why Steve Jobs’s Exit Is The Best Thing For Apple!

For the past 12 years, the world has watched in awe as Mr. Steve Jobs has resurrected Apple from a floundering computer maker whose best asset was the land it owned in Cupertino, to what’s today the world’s largest corporation.

During this period of time, it has restructured the world of music – pushing the big five record labels to the background, redefined the MP3 player that was the rage as recent as 5 years ago, redefined the Mobile Phone experience and put the US for once at the forefront of innovation in the mobile space, finally got the industry to execute on its promise of developers actually making money building mobile applications, introduced a whole new platform – the Tablet – its hard to imagine that the iPAD was commercially available in April 2010, and oh by the way, transformed the MAC as well.

Steve Jobs & Wozniak

The systematic introduction of new products every quarter is impressive – and many of us eagerly look forward to the quarterly announcements by Steve Jobs and Apple Corporation showcasing the next big thing. Apple Corporation and Steve Jobs truly mastered the art of a recurring CAPEX-based business model from consumers – and layered the iTunes or AppStore-based recurring revenues on top of it.

With Steve now “retired”, armchair critiques are fast to jump to the conclusion that this is the end of the road for the company, at least from its ability to lead/innovate and more importantly mesmerize the world into believing it really needed whatever was introduced.

I have a contrarian view on this – a theory that most people laugh at. But imagine this – “What if Steve, in his autocratic style, actually held back Apple Corporation?”

• What if he truly was they reason they introduced products every quarter, instead of every month?
• What if there are 10 other models of the iPhone that are just as good – but in Steve’s desire to “keep it simple” never saw the light of day?
• What if they introduced the Apple Social Network?
• What if they introduced the Apple Messenger on Android, RIM and Windows Mobile and Nokia phones?
• What if they opened things up and allowed true interoperability with non-iOS devices – for example on the messenger front?
• What if they licensed iOS for embedded automotive applications – what does that do to other products like Windows/Intel-VxWorks/Nucleus?
• What if one could port iOS to Samsung and HTC devices as well?
• What if Apple exited the device space?
• What if they allowed Person-2-Person money transfer with the iTunes credit cards on file for say 2% – would they take out Paypal?
• What if they introduced a Group Buying program since they pretty much know everything we do on our iPhone/iPAD?
• What if the new CEO actually is superior to Steve Jobs and unleashes more innovation and creativity than Steve Jobs?

The thought of any one of these should send shivers down the spines of CEO’s who are focused on building companies in each of these areas – yet they all know that with the resources Apple has got, its purely a question of deciding to focus on any of these areas and the company has the culture to out execute incumbents, established players or startups.

Indeed the biggest question right now isn’t one of “can they survive” – instead it’s a case of “will they continue to focus” or “will they get more creative” – and what does that mean for others in the industry.

The Swamy Says – no sir, you haven’t seen anything yet, Apple will run even faster and in three years the world will say “imagine if Steve Jobs had retired earlier”!

What’s your opinion?

[Guest author, Sanjay Swamy is a serial entrepreneur and Angel Investor – he is currently the Chairman of ZipDial and used to be the CEO of mChek and has worked as a volunteer at the UIDAI.]

Infographic: Steve Jobs

courtesy: columnfivemedia

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August 2011 Japan IT Links (Part 3)

Please follow this new Asiajin Mixi page if you have a Mixi account.

Continued from (Part 2). Last part of August news which we did not write as a dedicated article.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Dragonslayer Wedding Cake Cut Celemony

  

• Mixi Changes Its Logo. A blog Orange wrote [J] that the new logo becomes more similar to a fancy character Miffy punching you, which was often said even with the old logo

  

• KDDI au To Limit Data Usage On Flat-Rate Users
• Narita Airport Sign For Japanese Samurai

  

• The Japan Times Launches Daily Deal Service For Expats
• Findog - Dentsu Releases Product-Search Camera App For iPhone via release
• Ikea Japan officially answers they do not sells rocket launchers. - another new social media heroin with esprit and humor
• Transgender Boys Gathers At Local Festival With Homage To A Character Boy In An Animation

  

• High-school Baseball Players Who Won Japan's Second Place Accsued By Drinking, Which Is Found On Past Blog
• How Not To Sleep Your PC - lifehack!

  

• Maeda Corp. Estimates Construction Cost For Thunderbird's Island via Slashdot Japan
• Okite - Free iPhone Wake-up Alarm Posting Embarassing Tweets If You Don't Stop It via Cnet Japan
• Yahoo! Japan Makes Partnership With JCB. Consumers Can Connect Both IDs.
• Gree To Redistribute Unity Game Engine For Free With Its Partners Exclusively via Markezine
• Google Adwords (Japan?) Fails To Receive Credit Card Payments By System Trouble, But Stopped Customers Ads. so many complainments
• Artifitial Vampire Tooths To Make Japanese Cute. not really IT but from 2-channel. of course, most Japanese do not imagine Vampire from such shape of teeth but see some cuteness. a good example of cultural difference on what is beauty.

  

• See-through Glass print Showing Different Ads To Different Direction Night And Day [pdf] On the day and night, different ads are displayed to different directions.

  

• Korean Vocaloid Character Design Revealed

  

• Life2Bits release the iPhone app called 'OnSay', which allows you to make an IP phone call to your Twitter follower without dialing his/her phone number.
• Baboo - Baby-Avatar Android Chat App via release

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

August 2011 Japan IT Links (Part 3)

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Popular 2-Channel Ascii Arts Animated

It has been 12 years since 2-channel serves Japanese net users. The gigantic anonymous bulletin boards are still kept simple without image/movie, all you type is texts.

You may post URL of images there, and many 2-channel viewer clients, which many users are now using, extracted to display in the posts for convenience. But still, many prefer to use so-called Ascii Art, drawing composed by letters and symbols.

There are a lot of Ascii Art dictionary sites (example [J]) and assisting tools. 2-channel users copy and paste an Ascii Art which shows their emotion.

On a certain thread on 2-channel, users tried to make an animated gif version of well-known Ascii Arts.

Here, the Japanese letters "Ban-ban-ban" in background means a sound you bash not PC.

ﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝ
ﾊﾞﾝ　　　　　　　ﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾞﾝ ﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝ
ﾊﾞﾝ（∩`･ω･）　　ﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾊﾞﾝﾞﾝ
　＿/_ﾐつ/￣￣￣/
　　　 ＼/＿＿＿/￣

Wake-waka-ran = I am in complete confusion.

　　ワケ　　　　　ワカ　　　　　ラン♪
　 ∧＿∧　　　∧＿∧　　　　∧＿∧
　（　・∀・）　　（　・∀・）　　　（　・∀・）
⊂　⊂　 ）　　（　Ｕ　　つ　　⊂__へ　つ
　<　<　<　　　　）　）　）　　　　　（＿）|
　（＿（＿）　　（_＿）＿）　　　 彡（_＿）

whew... uh.. yeah... I am really excited!

　　 ∩＿＿＿∩三　ー＿　　　　　 　 ∩＿＿＿∩
　　 |ノ　　　 　　三-二　　　 　ー二三 ノ　　　 　　ヽ
　　/　　(ﾟ) 　　　(ﾟ)三二-　￣　　 - 三　　 (ﾟ)　　　(ﾟ) |　　
　 |　　　　( _●_)　 ミ三二 - ー二三　　　　( _●_)　 ミ　ウオーオォーアッヒャアウオホーオオオ
　彡､　　　|∪|　　､｀￣￣三-　三　 彡､　　　|∪|　　ミ　　　　テンション上がってきた！！
/　＿＿　 ヽノ　　　Y￣)　三 三 　 (/'　　　　ヽノ＿ 　|　　　　　　テンション上がってきた！！
(＿＿＿）　　　　　　　_ノ　　　　　　 ヽ/　　　　　(＿＿＿）

These animation show well how Japanese are seeing action in few texts drawings.

There are more on a 2-channel summary site Kinisoku [J].

Popular 2-Channel Ascii Arts Animated

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Web Wednesday with Sharon Malaby of Spiral Media and Digital – 14 Sep

This upcoming Wednesday, Sharon Malaby of Spiral Media and Digital will be the speaker of Web Wednesday. She will share about online social gaming, one of the biggest phenonmenon in the digital world and how do brands participate in gaming and build a social branding strategy. As a company, Spiral has brought together the most popular social gaming publishers from Silicon Valley and offers social advertising to brands and agencies in our region.

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Event Details

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When: Wednesday, 14th September 2011
Time: 630pm-9pm
Where: Beer Market at Clarke Quay (Map)
Register here.

 

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Events For The Week – 10-17 Sep

For a one-stop to all events related to or concerning entrepreneurship, certain industry-meets-business forums and seminars in Singapore, check out our Calendar. If not, you can also follow our bite-size updated posts for upcoming events for the week.

Events range from simple get-togethers to full-blown conferences. Get to meet fellow developers, entrepreneurs, startup CEOs & founders, and meet & learn from CEOs of established companies who have seen it all.

Our aim here at SGE is to make it easy for you to pick & choose from the event buffet. Enjoy.

Here are the events for this week. Events are mostly in Singapore (generally 30 minutes drive from anywhere), but we also include key events from around Southeast Asia and beyond.

Saturday 10th September:

(1) BarcampSG7

Wednesday 14th September:

(1) Click Asia MasterClass
(2) Web Wednesday with Sharon Malaby of Spiral Media and Digital

Thursday 15th September:

(1) Servcorp Business Shorts with Anthony Coundouris

Thursday to Friday 15th-16th September:

(1) Marketing and PR on a budget with Robin Low

Image courtesy of joyosity.

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Silicon Dragon Rang the Closing Bell

NASDAQ newsSeptember 08, 2011 Silicon Dragon, a news, events and consulting group, visited the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York City's Times Square. In honor of the occasion, the force behind Silicon Dragon, Rebecca Fannin rang the Closing Bell.This news, events and consulting group was founded by journalist and author Rebecca Fannin in 2009. The group publishes international newsletters for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, programs business conferences for startup founders and investors in New York, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore, and provides editorial content for multinational tech and financial companies, including KPMG and Sony. Silicon Dragon testified as an expert witness on China's Internet before a U.S.-China Commission in Washington, D.C. Silicon Dragon draws upon a rich library, from Ms. Fannin's extensive reporting in Asia for nearly two decades for Forbes, CEO, HBR.com, The Deal, Red Herring and several other business publications. The content resources include two books penned by Ms. Fannin: Silicon Dragon (McGraw-Hill, 2008) and Startup Asia (Wiley, forthcoming Oct. 2011).

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On Reviewing Startups, Telling The Truth And Firing CEOs

As we woke up to the news of Carol Bartz being fired the other day, not in a very friendly manner, we couldn’t help go back to the Techcrunch interview where Arrington made her spew the F word by asking her too many hard questions. That interview and some recent developments have made some of us think if we can ever have a “no holds barred” reporting and relationship that TC has with the larger startup community in the US.

Will we do a good job for Pluggd.in and the Indian startup community if we say only good things about them or urge you to try them by yourself? Do we become a mouthpiece for PR agency shit? Do we have the balls and the will to write scathing reviews and not care about the repercussions?

This thought brings us to two most probable reactions that readers might have

1. Write the truth but back it up with facts.
2. Always write goody goody stuff and let the reader decide.

Let us take up the second point first. Most of our readers are adults who are interested in, read up on or employed with technology companies. They have toiled their way through engineering school (or medical and law schools) and are now doing relatively well than their previous generations. They are not idiots (and we do not intend to treat them as such). Goody shit doesn’t help anyone. Not the readers – for whom it is an insult, not the founders – who do not get any real feedback on their product and lastly not this site because we do not add any value to the 10 minutes you spent on reading the shitty goody post.

We have faced some flak on (1) as well on a particular post we had written. Most of them are personal insults to the author – which are duly ignored. But some of them were regarding the blog, writing style, mode of analysis (judgmental or otherwise) and finally on not being specific or a startup not being ready for review.

Let me cut paste an internal email thread that we had on the mentioned startup

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Author – These guys are pitching a very good thing in the wrong way. They are actually offering a hosted site to local retailers with feature to showcase products/ deals etc. Have written to them with feedback. The product is not ready to review now. They will gain nothing. should we still review it?

Editor 1 - I personally think that if a company does a PR, they think its good to release. Our feedback in that case should be in terms of the review. The decision to review / not review is a different one – but I found your point below extremely relevant and by itself worth a review

Editor 2 – good point. Here is the thing: If not us, others will profile them. If we want to be relevant, we shd profile them and actually share the feedback in the post. That adds value (others will only do PR).

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That is the thing guys. We REVIEW. We are not mouthpieces of your PR agency. If you want to hear good stories – hire a nice PR agency, make them write up about your startup in glowing words and mix it up with some Koolaid or Bhang (depending upon where you are from) and drink it (Recommended Read: Fuck the Accolades. Seek the Criticism).

We have reviewed and showcased a lot of startups in the past – many of them critically. But some of them (to quote one example) – e.g. Flipkart has been mature about it (ref: the Flipkart story). They have taken pains to call the aforementioned author and clarify their point and actually take notes on points where they can improve. And that’s just one example of many.

As far as critics are concerned, maybe we should have ignored it – as Nikhil suggests and as the author himself suggested. But we are not in the business of ignoring.

That is, we are not your PR agency and will never be one. We are a site that gives you an unbiased feedback on your product (we aren’t journalists). We will review startups. We will give credit where it’s due and pan a startup when necessary. Getting feedback, getting discouraged, failing and trying again are part of being a startup. If you can’t take it – well too bad.

But the reality is world isn’t going to be fair just because you are doing a startup. So stop drinking your kool aid and brace yourself for the road ahead.

It ain’t easy.

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Ashish/Pratyush/Team Pi.

[Image credit: h.koppdelaney/Flickr]

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