Mobile App Kongfu English Costs A Whopping $899.99!

Scrolling aimlessly on Sina Weibo on a lazy Friday afternoon [Ed: Get back to work!], I came across this super awesome iPhone app — Kongfu English — tweeted by Weibo user, Shoujik.

What’s remarkable about it is the eye-opening price: a super awesome 5,898 RMB price tag – at the new local currency prices that launched today on Apple’s iTunes App Store.

That has scared that shit out of many folks on Weibo, including my colleague, Mr. Millward (bollocks, yeah!?). Over on the US version of the store, it costs a similar $899.99 (iTunes link). To be honest, I’m not sure if the app’s functions are amazing – but its cost sure as hell is.

Kongfu English, as depicted on iTunes, is an iOS app that helps Chinese learn English. It claims to use high technology to help students to teach themselves English.

Kongfu English also says that users are expected to be able to converse in English within six months of using the app. Also, it claims it was the best and number one app in the iTunes China education section in 2010. Take it with a pinch of salt, as we’re unable to verify if the information is true.

To be fair, Kongfu English has 1.80 GB worth of English learning materials to download, so you get more than just the one app. Some of the screenshots also look useful for an English beginner.

So if you break down the numbers and volume, the price seems reasonable. But for folks who are so used to downloading apps for a mere 99 cents (or 6 RMB at today’s new local currency exchange rate on iTunes), $899.99 is seriously too much to swallow.

So much so that it has become a joke on the Chinese interwebs to see an app priced this high. Haha!

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Liveaboard Diving Holidays

Another great aspect of liveaboard diving holidays in the Maldives is that, because there is usually a refreshing breeze and the ships anchor at a certain distance from the nearest island, you don’t need to worry about mosquito bites. For many, no diving safari in the Maldives is complete without spending at least one night on deck. The stars over this part of the world are simply breathtaking and it is not unusual to see several shooting stars before being gently rocked to sleep by the waves. This famous holiday mantra is often heard on dive safari boats in the Maldives. If you want to completely switch off and get away from it all, there is no better place for it than a Maldivian liveaboard.

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Blogopolis Visualizes The Tech Blogging Buzz in Japan [PICS]

Last week in Fukuoka, I stumbled upon Kaisei Hamamoto, the creator of Blogopolis.jp. He had some great visualization on the screen and out of curiosity, I asked him “what’s that?!”

He then zoomed in and out to showoff his creation, Blogopolis.jp, which I must say looks pretty. When first logged in, Blogopolis shows you the various topics that are being discussed/shared within the Japanese tech community. And when you click on a topic, some charts appear to shows you the number of subscribers and bookmarks made.

While Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Digg are some of our favorite bookmarking sites, in Japan, Hatena is the clear choice.

As you zoom in into the world of Blogopolis, you will notice that each article/blog is represented by blocks of various sizes. Hamamoto explained that the area of each block represents the number of bookmarks and height represents subscribers. The larger or higher it is, the more bookmarks or subscribers that article has.

Although Blogopolis does look pretty, using it as a daily curated reader would be a tough habit to adopt… Unless you have time to zoom in and out everyday looking for articles. For curated reading, social bookmarking sites or Twitter list are still the best for now.

Of course, Blogopolis is just Hamamoto’s side gig. He told me that he has been in the content curation business for many years.

Crowsnest is his latest startup; it’s basically a Twitter news aggregator built specifically for the Japanese. Hamamoto believes that social media will play a crucial role in shaping online users reading habits and thus started Crowsnest to help curate and list content from Twitter.

One thing unqiue is that Crowsnest attaches all related tweets to a news article which helps users understand more about what other people are saying.

Or to put it simply, it’s like weibo with threaded comments (a feature Twitter says it left out “by design”…)

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Neoteny Labs portfolio company Animoca raises millions in Series A funding

Animoca, a Hong Kong based games developer, has just raised Series A funding from Intel Capital and IDG-Accel, reported Inside Mobile Apps on 15th November. According to a reliable source, the sum is in the double digit millions.

The prolific mobile games company has developed over 150 apps for both iOS and Android, and garnered over 21 million downloads. Noted games include Pretty Pet Salon and Baby Cortex. It is also a portfolio company of Singapore-based startup incubator Neoteny Labs.

The company’s CEO David Kim said: “In just ten months we have built Animoca into one of the – if not the – largest app game companies in this part of the world.”

Animoca will use the investment to develop its app business further. It is a spin-off company of OutBlaze Limited, a cloud computing services provider.

Neoteny Labs has a slew of gaming-related companies under its wings. They include: Game Closure, which offers an HTML5-based multiplayer game development kit, and Game Ventures, which makes and markets competitive multiplayer social games.

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Beleaguering Baidu: Qihoo and Tencent Eye Search Market

Baidu, the dominant Chinese search engine which claims more than 70% of market share is facing imminent competition as Qihoo 360 and Tencent both lately showed their interests in stepping into search market, a fruitful territory.

Zhou Hongyi, Qihoo 360 CEO revealed in the conference call for third quarter financial results that the internet security company would make vigorous efforts to build its own search service as part of a drive to enhance revenue streams, expand revenue sources as well as better leverage their unique strength in its browser and personalized start page hao.360.cn.

Zhou said quoting 3rd party sources that Hao360 has overtaken Baidu’s hao123.com as the number 1 service of its kind, a personalized start page that aggregates the most visited Chinese websites. The service generated a lot of traffic for search engines, which makes Hao360 more like a upstream site for Baidu, Sogou and other Chinese web crawlers. And that’s when Qihoo realized that they could also take a bite from the search forefront.

According to Zhou, Qihoo will differ itself from other search payer in three key points. For starters, Qihoo won’t try to build another Baidu, they’re not doing a traditional search engine. Next up, Qihoo want to reinvent the search pattern by making the most value out of its personalized start page. Since they already accumulated tremendous data from hao.360.cn, they’re now capable of providing a personalized recommendation engine with which users  can perform search without the need to type in any search keywords. That page knows you pretty well through your previous clicking behaviors and thus could suggest you with recommended links and related services you might want to check out – traditionally by type in keywords into search engine. And thirdly, Zhou said that Qihoo is working on something more like a vertical search engine.

This isn’t the first time Zhou and his team cast an eye on search market. He founded 3721.com, the first Chinese search engine which was sold to Yahoo!

Tencent SVP Li Haixiang also said lately that Soso, the search portfolio of Tencent would speed up and challenge Baidu from social and wireless aspects with more R&D investments in the years to come. The Shenzhen-based company will launch a Baidu Phoenix Nest like advertising platform in next month.

Youku, one of the most popular video site also suggesting that some of the big players give no chance to the true innovators in China market. After launching Qiyi.com, Baidu no longer features Youku contents in its video search service.

Youku launched its own video-centric vertical search couple months ago, and as of now the service has grown to be the second service of its kind.

 

Related posts:

1. With Soku, Youku Wants the Video Search Market Competing with Baidu
2. Qihoo 360 Will Enter the IM Market to Battle QQ
3. Google And Tencent Partnership On Search Engine Will End Soon

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Some Chinese Government Websites Haven’t Been Updated in Years

The Beijing Government site is actually pretty decent

Perhaps it’s just because everyone is moving to Weibo, but a lot of Chinese government websites — sites that represent the official online face of city governments, departments, bureaus, etc. — haven’t been updated in a long time. How long? In some cases, we’re talking years.

A Southern Metropolis Daily reporter conducted an investigation of city government websites around the country, and found that nearly 30 percent of them had problems like infrequent updates or being no longer maintained. Additionally, the reporter found that many sites hadn’t posted phone hotline numbers, or that the numbers that were posted were disconnected, went unanswered during office hours, or even were so out of date that they were actually the phone numbers of private residences.

Unsurprisingly, government spokesmen responded that the relevant departments would oversee and correct this issue going forward.

Although there are plenty of bad things one could say about the American government these days, I was reminded just yesterday while doing some research for a post of just how thorough and up-to-date many of the official government websites are, and how useful that is to me sometimes as a citizen. They’re not always brilliantly designed, but the information you’re looking for is usually there. This is in sharp contrast to a lot of Chinese government sites, which are even more poorly designed and — apparently — also frequently outdated.

Of course, with Weibo platforms and the like, the government seems to be leaning increasingly on professionals like Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) to help with their web presences. But we do hope some of their sites can be updated and overhauled. Microblogging is nice, but when you’re looking for specific information, nothing beats an actual website with a nice clear nav bar and a functional search feature!

[Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech]

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Apple Launches Local Currency Payments For its China iTunes App Store

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iTunes App Store has rolled out a major upgrade this morning in China, and now, for the first time, it actually accepts payments in the local currency, the renminbi (RMB). As part of the new RMB payment system, the China iTunes Store now accepts local bank cards – from over a dozen major Chinese banks – but not third-party payment platforms such as Alibaba’s Alipay, Union Pay, or the American Paypal.

In the past, Apple required a credit card that was able to process US dollar transactions, which left out many iPhone and iPad owners in China, who were theoretically then just able to download free apps by making a store account.

(Original image source: news.imeigu.com)

The new bank card system that Apple has implemented allows users to ‘top-up’ their iTunes balance with preset amounts, in increments of 50, 100, 300, and 500 RMB (pictured right). This will be familiar to many people here as the way they charge up bus cards, or their mobile phone credit.

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Tackling Piracy and ‘Black Cards’

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The move is also designed to combat piracy of iOS apps in China, which has been thriving under the previous inconveniences/restrictions. Just this week we saw a major Chinese web company, Tencent (HKG:0700), launch a shanzhai iTunes app that helps you avoid Apple’s tightly-controlled ecosystem, and there’s the Chinese-made iTools desktop app that assists in the jailbreaking and adding of pirated/cracked apps.

In addition, Apple has been fighting the ongoing problem of iTunes ‘black cards’ circulating on the internet, which use hacked credit card accounts to give buyers dollars worth of credit on a temporary iTunes account for a mere few RMB. The fraudulent practice got so out of hand earlier this year, that e-commerce site Taobao blocked searches for “iTunes” and “app store” so as to suffocate the black card vendors.

A lot of grey-import iPhones and iPads (unlocked devices imported from nearby countries) are jailbroken by the seller, almost as a courtesy; it’s a practice that has escalated over time. Of course, a jailbroken iOS device can still buy apps in the legitimate way, and Apple will surely hope that this new, very localized payment solution will be helpful in that.

In contrast, poor old Google (NASQAQ:GOOG) is having a tougher time getting paid apps support for Android implemented in China – perhaps because of regulatory blocks by a government that perceptibly dislikes the American search engine.

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RIM Finally Opens a Blackberry Store in Indonesia

Queue in Indonesia, Photo: Crackberry.com

The first Blackberry Lifestyle store has finally opened for Blackberry-loving Indonesia over at Mal Kelapa Gading 3 in Jakarta. With a 50 percent discount of any Blackberry products for the first 250 individuals, more than a hundred people queued to enter the opening of the store.

The Blackberry Lifestyle Store isn’t quite like a normal store that sells Blackberry handsets, they do sell Blackberrys, but RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM) has put a lively touch on its retail space taking a page from what Apple did with theirs. This shouldn’t be confused with one of the Blackberry Support Centers or Service Centers, but rather this store is more elegant and specially prepared for customers as what Blackberry hopes is a must-visit lifestyle place.

Within the store you can find large LCD screens, a full collection of Blackberry and Blackberry accessories on display. The company’s Playbook tablet is also available and usually you can demo it on the big screen. To get an idea of how things look, you can check the pictures of the Blackberry Lifestyle store in Thailand over on the Crackberry forum and the video over on Blackberry’s YouTube channel.

As we recently reported, RIM just released its first batch of OS 7 smartphones followed by the launch of the Bold 9790 and Curve 9380, released first in Indonesia. We expect that RIM has high hopes for moving a great number of those units from its new store.

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Asia Tech Tour Episode 1: Kakaku.com from Japan

This is episode 1 of our Asia Tech Tour video series
Tech Tour Video series. If there’s any Asian service or app that you’d like to see us explore, please send us your request.

Kakaku.com is a pretty fascinating price-comparison engine that I use quite a bit here in Japan. There are a number of cool features that I find myself coming back to regularly, namely the handy ‘price down’ list which shows products whose price have recently dropped, as well as a informative graph that shows the change in price over time. The products offered range from electronics to bicycles and everything in between.

You can search for a specific product, or browse around for something you like. Invariably before I ever make any major purchase I find myself scouting the price on Kakaku beforehand. More often than not the site will direct me to a third party online retailer (quite often it’s Amazon Japan) and I can order from the comfort of home. Because — with due apologies in advance to my wife — going outside to shop is for suckers.

Anyway, check out the brief video tour of Kakaku below. We’re hoping to bring you more video tours of Asian web services and applications in the future, so stay tuned.

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