Our writer, Joyce Huang, is organizing the first Singapore Geek Girl Meetup in the very first weekend of 2012. Check out this event if you’re a woman who’s excited to live and breathe in the world of digital opportunities. Guys can join the meetup as well by simply tagging along with their female friends.
Event Details
When: Saturday, 7th January 2011
Time: 4pm-7pm
Where: Group Therapy Coffee, 49 Duxton Road #02-01, Singapore 089513 (Map)
RSVP here.
Chinese LBS service Jiepang which has been leading the territory with innovative thinking and exploring the sector with early-adoption of cutting-edge technology like NFC announced this week releasing the latest version of its iOS and Android app with new features including photo tagging, new filters and so on.
The new version dubbed “Jiepang Friends” is positioned as a tool to help people better tracking and sharing their daily life with intimate friends via feature like photo tagging, the function made famous by Flickr and Facebook. After taking or uploading a photo while you’re checking-in with Jiepang app, you can touch the screen to tag a friend, just like how it works on Facebook.
Better yet, you can not only tag your Jiepang Friends, but also tag those who are users of other mainstream Chinese social networking service like Renren, Douban and Sina Weibo and have their accounts linked with Jiepang, a move to spur users’ check-in behavior through better leveraging on other platforms. At the same time, syncing joys onto other platforms can also help Jiepang gain more traction and buzz among China’s social networking sites.
The app also added a new tab on the bottom navbar to help users better handle friends-related stuff, like searching a friend, viewing friend list and responding friend requests. Beside, 8 new photo filters are added in to make the photo taking experience more visually fun.
David Liu, founder and CEO of Jiepang said that “numerous people recording their life with Jiepang every day, we hope the new app can better help them tracking and sharing their every moments in daily life with closest friends, a direction that we’ve been working on since the beginning of Jiepang.”
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The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo Inc. is planning to sell of large chunks of its Asian assets, in an effort to give its investors some cash and begin to refocus on their core advertising business.
One of the major assets is Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, which Yahoo owns a 40% stake of. The other notable Asian asset is Yahoo Japan, of which they own 35%. The total value of these assets is around USD$17-18 billion. The news sparked a share price rise of 6% or 88 cents to USD$15.99.
Rumours have circulated that Alibaba itself would buy back its shares from Yahoo. However, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma has apparently become more open to the possibility of Yahoo retaining a smaller percentage of Alibaba.
Although Yahoo is still popular and generates over USD$4 billion in net revenue from online ads and other fees, it has lagged behind faster growing rivals, Google and Facebook.
WSJ reported, “The plan for the Asian assets would involve Alibaba creating a subsidiary into which it would put several billion dollars of cash, plus an operating asset that Yahoo wants to buy using additional cash from Alibaba, almost like giving Yahoo a prepaid card for an asset of its choice, the people said.”
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Mumbai and Silicon Valley based database infrastructure software maker, ScaleArc, founded by Varun Singh, has secured $5.33 million in its second round of institutional funding, which was led by Trinity Ventures, with earlier backer Nexus Venture Partners participating. The new funds will accelerate geographic and staffing expansion to meet increased demand. Trinity Ventures led the funding round with full participation of the company’s original investor, Nexus Venture Partners
In addition, ScaleArc announced the appointment of Justin Barney, who previously ran sales divisions at companies like Citrix and Juniper Networks, as president and COO.
ScaleArc’s iDB software, which is available for MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and Postgres database environments, offers real-time query analytics and control, instant horizontal scaling, caching, dynamic load balancing and more, all without any changes to existing applications or databases.
With exponentially growing data and increasing transaction rates, organizations face substantial cost and complexity in scaling their database architecture in a cost-effective manner while increasing performance, visibility and uptime. The ScaleArc iDB software provides a wide spectrum of capabilities: real-time query-analytics and control, instant horizontal scaling for capacity growth or high availability, one-click query caching, automated sharding, dynamic load balancing, enforcement of security policies, and much more, allwithout any changes to existing applications or databases.It is the only solution that reduces overall CapEx and OpExcosts by up to 50% and delivers instant performance improvements of 6x-24x with no disruptions to existing environments.
Started by Varun Singh (ex-CTO of Web18), ScaleArc’s customers cover a wide range of industries including eCommerce, web 2.0 / SaaS, online gaming, digital media companies, service providers, and enterprises.
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Finding a PG accommodation is generally a tough job for students and freshers newly moved to a city. If you are in Kolkata, Connectmess is there to help you out.
Connectmess aims at bridging the gap between landlords and paying guests. The advertisers are charged a nominal one-time fee for putting up theirs ads on connectmess.com and accommodation seekers are offered free assistance via email and a helpline number (903828-1838). They are provided with the details, facilities, rent and contact number and name of the paying-guest/mess owner. One can also browse for the paying-guest or mess by clicking on a college or on an area.
Connectmess was conceived by Abhishek Patra in Feb 2011, and funded by savings from odd jobs in Kolkata. Abhishek is a MSc Computer Science from St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and has done most of the development for the application. He is aided by three full-time employees and a one-man call-center.
There are several places to advertise for a PG: newspapers, magazines, online sites, or even restaurants. And then there are brokers. However, each one of these options have drawbacks. Newspaper ads are very costly, offer a small real estate for details and suffer from the problem of localization. Internet sites, especially the free ones, offer no authenticated information and place brokers and individuals together. Brokers charge heavily. Connectmess provides a one-stop search place for all needs by charging a nominal fee and streamlining the system by providing a 24/7 telephonic support.
The PG owners undergo an authentication process before their ads are placed on Connectmess. “A representative visits them in person, inspects their property and asks them to fill up a form with their signature. Later, we cross-check the advertiser by making a call as a seeker before placing their ad. It’s all done within 24 hours.”, says Patra. “The advertiser receives smses with contact details of wannabe paying guests, who can also opt to receive text messages for advertisements in their desired location.”
Already popular in Kolkata, Abhishek has plans to extend this to other cities as well, and to broaden the reach to flats and houses. They are already working towards hitting Guest Houses by next month.
A novel idea, Connectmess brings a fresh approach to solving the problem already addressed by many players. However, the simplicity and ease, and the savings on time and money for both the landlord and the tenant is what makes them stand out. There is a long way to go. For the team, I would suggest they should work on improving the User Experience of their portal, which provides all information but looks rather insipid. Listing down feedbacks from happy customers could be useful too. And yes, expanding the reach to target all kind of tenants, which are already in plans.
How has your experience been with hunting houses? Did you make use of other sites to look for places? And if you are relocating to Kolkata and looking for a PG, give Connectmess a call.
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Net rumors today continue to suggest that the massive hacks we reported on yesterday may also have affected social networking sites like Renren (NYSE:RENN). Renren hasn’t confirmed that it was hacked, but in speaking to the Dongfang Daily, Renren reps did suggest it was possible that hackers had fished Renren user data out of the CDSN database that was hacked.
Some users are reporting they’ve received official messages suggesting they change their passwords. As of 1 P.M. Beijing time on Friday, I have received no such notification on my own personal Renren account, but it seems prudent to suggest that any Renren users change their passwords anyway, as well as changing the passwords for any other site that used Renren login credentials or used the same password as on Renren.
We know it’s a pain to use different passwords for every site, but hacks like this pose a serious threat to the safety of your personal information. They’re also big business — the CDSN hack reportedly could net the hackers millions in data sales — so they’re not going anywhere. Get a password manager if you don’t have one, and use a safe password. Try this site to see how well you’re doing (but keep in mind it doesn’t matter how safe your password is if someone hacks the database it’s stored in). It’s also best to change passwords frequently on any accounts you can’t afford to lose information from or control of. It’s a pain, sure, but the alternative is worse.
[Dongfang Daily via Sina Tech]
LinkedIn established their Singapore office about seven months ago, and since then it has been a full-scale Asian rollout for the social network targeted at professionals. At the recent media lunch, LinkedIn’s APAC and Japan vice-president and managing director, Arvind Rajan, announced that the the company will be doubling the number of employees in Singapore alone. This is up from eight to 10 employees, just to give an idea of the investments LinkedIn is making in the region. Why here? Since May, LinkedIn has added 35 million members worldwide, 3 million of which are from the APAC and Japan region. Some of LinkedIn’s largest markets are Australia, which just crossed 2 million members and India, which broke the 10 million mark recently. According to Arvind, ” We have seen a lot of growth and expansion and this is really great for LinkedIn because it has lead us to really be able to make significant strides. I think the first big thing is by having people here on the ground who really are able to get local insights about how we can continue to make LinkedIn effective for our members. There is no substitute for that.”
And having a strong localized presence is what LinkedIn has been doing to date. They opened their first office in Tokyo just last October, a tech center in Bangalore with three offices in India alone – Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi. LinkedIn has also doubled their offices in Australia with the opening of the Melbourne office to supplement the lone office in Sydney, and of course the APAC headquarters based in Singapore. ”The world today is incredibly well networked and the work force is global, [but] we still need to be locally relevant in key countries across the world. Our language expansions have been a big part of that. Adding LinkedIn in Japanese, Korean, Malay and Bahasa Indonesia has really allowed LinkedIn to become locally available to professionals,” said Arvind.
Arvind also conveyed LinkedIn’s interest in the region’s potential by saying, ”These days, if you look where most exciting innovations happen, it is happening here. And Singapore allows us to be close to all of that. So we are incredibly excited about that.”
LinkedIn offers its members three value propositions – To establish a professional identity, provide insights and to be available everywhere. With professional identity, LinkedIn provides its members with the ability to connect, find other people and be found by others with a profile that provides detailed information, especially for college students.”College students are our fastest growing demographic on LinkedIn. A lot of college students are using LinkedIn to find their first professional employment. We now allow the ability for college students to list the classes they took, recommendations from professors and a range of things to allow them to put their best foot forward in the work force,” highlights Arvind.
To ensure the LinkedIn members have the access to the relevant insights that they need, LinkedIn Today allows members to leverage on their professional network to filter information. According to Arvind, ”We do this because we now have millions of our users sharing information on LinkedIn everyday. They have also paired their LinkedIn account with their Twitter account. And they are also sharing content across over 200,000 websites. We can then use all the information that they are sharing and filter it by professional identity so that you can go to LinkedIn Today, and if you care about for example real estate, you can see the news and information people in your industry are reading everyday.”
LinkedIn is also looking to provide analytic tools to owners of LinkedIn groups. These tools will allow groups owners to gain insights on member behaviors. Further value add would be the “Apply with LinkedIn” feature where companies can grab a code and place it on their recruitment sites. These would then allow LinkedIn’s members who applied for the job to share and find people that are connected to that company and request for recommendations. All this is done so that members can leverage on their networks to find opportunities.
Apps Foundry, an Indonesian mobile development company headquartered in Singapore, announced on 22nd December that they have raised S$1M (US$0.77M) from Gobi Partners and Mitsui Global Investment to further develop SCOOP, their flagship newsstand app.
SCOOP, which was launched in Indonesia last year, has over 800 magazines, tabloids, and books in its stable.
70 percent of Indonesian magazines have their digital editions on the app, which has so far been downloaded over 120,000 times, making it one of the top ten grossing iPad apps in Indonesia. SCOOP is also available for the iPhone.
Gobi Partners is a venture capital firm headquartered in Shanghai focusing on early stage digital media and technology startups. While it invests primarily in Chinese companies, it has also funded a couple of Singapore-based ones, most notably games developer Time Voyager and media company Xinya.
Mitsui Global Investment is a Tokyo-based investment firm that funds startups mainly from US, China, and Japan in the areas of heathcare, IT, F&B, and retail.
The involvement of these two VC firms indicate Apps Foundry’s interest to develop SCOOP for the Chinese and Japanese markets.
“With their extensive knowledge in their home countries, we will be able to learn from the experience in these other markets and leverage on their networks,” said Willson Cuaca, CEO of Apps Foundry. “We will use the fund to bring in more regional publishers, improve our infrastructure and expand our product range.”
Previous Apps Foundry investors include East Ventures, a Singapore and Indonesia-based VC firm, and Nic Lim, co-founder of Catcha.com, a Malaysian online media company.
SCOOP faces stiff competition from other newsstand apps out in the market.
One example is Zinio, which has over 850 titles available for download. They recently raised around US$20M in funding. Internet giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Yahoo also have their own newsstand apps.
A merlion or a seahorse?
Finally, right? Singaporeans love Foursquare so much that the location-based network now has a dedicated badge for them. It’s simple to get the badge. Just check in to five of the Singapore spots (there are 71 in total) and you will be awarded the Lion City Badge! How cool is that?
What can you do with the badge? Nothing much, I think. But for the many badge lovers/chasers on Foursquare, it could still mean a lot. And for Foursquare, it will bring them more check-ins and usage time.
Foursquare’s Lion City badge actually include some of the most interesting spots in Singapore, including Sentosa, East Coast Park, Holland Village, Fort Canning Park, and Pulau Ubin. So for a tourist, it may prove to be a useful list for exploring Singapore systematically. Good for Charlie, Steven, Rick, and the many folks who will be here for Startup Asia Singapore this coming February.
This isn't really related to the post at all, but it got your attention, didn't it?
2011 has been an interesting year. And, although I didn’t join the Penn Olson team until this summer, I’ve had plenty of time to write about some interesting stuff. From all of the posts I’ve written this year, here are my favorites (what can I say, I love myself…):
All credit due to North Korea Tech for finding and publicizing this link to a live stream of North Korean state TV, which I watched in fascination for a few hours while writing this story. It turned out to be especially significant when Kim Jong-il died just a week or so later, and I’ve chosen to include it here because it’s a fascinating window into a country that we very rarely get the chance to write about.
This was my first infographic, and it’s not the most amazing thing you’ll ever see, but I spent a lot of time on it. Plus, I really like that robot.
This was perhaps my favorite interview of the year. This is not so much because anything particularly crazy was said, but because Dong Lu is a well-spoken guy who is excited about his business, and I came away impressed enough to recommend the site to my wife. Plus, browsing La Miu to find the images that accompany this article was fun.
I picked this because it was my favorite session at Disrupt, but really all of our posts from that event were great, and many of them — like this one, which like all of the liveblogs was actually set up and posted by Rick Martin — were a real team effort. Liveblogging anything wouldn’t have been possible without everyone pitching in, and I think we did an awesome job.
My biggest frustration with the tech industry is that it has a tendency to portray itself as the revolutionary savior of the world. In actuality, most tech startups aren’t trying to save the world, they’re just trying to earn someone a whole bunch of money. Not all of them, though. Forgoing mass profits to actually help some people out with your tech startup? Now that’s cool.
I’ve been expressing skepticism about this Lenovo-backed game console basically since I first heard of it, and I can’t help but feel like the repeated delays in its release prove my cynicism was well-grounded. I’m looking forward to getting to try the thing if it ever comes out, but right now, it looks like we’ll have to wait for next year’s year-in-review post to see how that goes.
Nothing special about this story, but I think that headline is pretty hilarious.
I’ve always wanted to be paid to review games, or to be paid to write really scathing reviews of things, and Sina Weibo’s addition of social games to their platform finally granted my wish. I’ve reviewed a bunch of them, but this was the first one and the one that disappointed me the most. I think I thrashed it well.
In watching the unmitigated disaster that has been China’s group buy market this year, I’ve gotten an opportunity to do some fun stuff. This early post allowed me to make repeated references to Game of Thrones, which I enjoy. Since then, I’ve done all kinds of stories about group buy sites as the “winter” comes and the bottom starts to fall out. Among the images I’ve chosen to accompany these posts: the grim reaper (twice), a graveyard, the Titanic sinking, and a throne made of skulls. Yeah, things aren’t going well.
The high speed rail accident in Wenzhou may have been China’s most significant news item this year, and it has had serious implications for Sina Weibo and other microblogging services, too. Looking back at this post from July with the knowledge that as of today, all of China’s major microblogging services require real-name registration, it seems I didn’t overestimate the significance at all.
Hey, while you’re here, check out our other year in review posts!
Japanese mobile carrier KDDI (TYO:9433) has announced that it will establish a data center in Sendai, one of the areas hit the hardest by the earthquake and tsunami this past March.
The center will be for managing mobile customer data, and will see up to 700 residents hired — good news for the city where employment is a major problem as the Sendai is still in the middle of rebuilding after the disaster. KDDI’s chairman Tadashi Onodera explained:
We need to set up the center to deal with a growing number of subscriptions for tablets such as smartphones… Considering the issue of employment, we have determined Sendai would be the best place.
It’s good to see technology companies getting involved with the recovery effort. Earlier this year we saw Amazon announce a call center in Sendai. That’s expected to open in the spring of 2012 and will bring about 1000 jobs to the area. Hopefully we can see more companies do the same, and the sooner the better.
The March earthquake was one of the biggest stories of the past year, although it has been gradually replaced in the news cycle by other things. That doesn’t mean that the recovery effort doesn’t need help though, so if you’d like to pitch in, there are still many ways to give this holiday season.
[Source: The Japan Times, Image from The Sanyo Shimbun]