Concept Lifebook Laptop Unifies All Your Gadgets

When Asus announced its Padphone last year, it turned more than a few heads with its phone-inside-a-tablet design. Say what you will about the appearance, but the idea of shared hardware is a clever notion. India-based industrial designer Prashant Chandra appears to have one-upped Asus designers with his concept Lifebook laptop, which has three sub-devices – a camera, a phone, and a tablet – all built in.

What’s clever here is the placement of those gadgets. The tablet, which would have a virtual keyboard, would take the position of where a normal keyboard would be, snapping in via a 16-pin connector, and defaulting to keyboard mode. The second sub-device, the phone/music player sits in a slot off to the left. Around the back, embedded in the lid of the Lifebook would be the laptop’s camera, which could be removed and used independently.

It’s important to note that this is just a concept design, and to my knowledge it has no official affiliation with Fujitsu [1]. But this hybrid approach means that everything is charges and syncs in one place, with no need for wires or stand-alone docs. Admittedly, you would be left with a gaping hole in your laptop if you lost either of those three components!

Nevertheless it’s a very cool idea, and even if we don’t see it implemented in this way exactly, it would be cool to see manufacturers build upon this idea.

Via Yanko Design

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1. Someone please correct me if I’m mistaken.  ↩

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Singapore’s ‘ACE’ to Provide S$28M to Seed 500 Startups, Removes Age Limit

Chairman of ACE, Teo Ser Luck (speaking)

We have good news for our Singaporean friends in the startup community. The chairman of Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE), Mr Teo Ser Luck, announced at a press conference today that ACE will be providing S$28 million to seed 500 startups.

What’s more, the new ACE startups program will also remove the requirement for applicants to be below 26 years old. This means even if you’re in your 40s or 50s and extremely passionate about starting up, this grant is absolutely for you.

Why the shift?

ACE recognizes that good business ideas can come from anyone regardless of their age, and will be extending a helping hand for those mid-career professionals and managers who are looking to leverage on their existing business networks and experience to start their own businesses. They are hoping for a bigger pool of startups, encouraging more talent with good ideas to create meaningful and sustainable businesses.

In addition to removing the age limit, there are also tweaks to the innovation criterion that was set in the earlier scheme. The program now targets startups who are able to differentiate their businesses from competitors and stand out within the industry. So startups need to pay attention to minor details which will better serve consumer markets.

Less red tape, more support

ACE also hopes to cut bureaucracies and streamline processes to help startups get funded fast. It has also set up five sub-committees (mentoring, networking, overseas chapters, communications, and ACE startups) to help entrepreneurs ease into the Singapore startup ecosystem. In a nutshell, these sub-committees are in place to allow mentors to guide startups in their growth, get entrepreneurs to be plugged into business communities, create a support network, and aid in overseas expansion.

So aspiring entrepreneurs out there (especially those previously held back by the age limit), what are you waiting for? To find out more about ACE’s new program, visit www.ace.sg today!

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And India’s First Startup Village Launched at Kochi

The country’s first Public Private Partnership (PPP) telecom business incubator – ‘Startup Village’ – will be set up at Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation Park in Kalamassery (Kochi).
Startup Village will focus primarily on student start-ups from college campuses and aims to incubate 1,000 product start-ups over 10 years and start the search for a billion-dollar company from a college campus by the turn of this decade.

The agreement on taking 15,000 sq ft space was signed between MobME Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Vijayakumar and Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation managing director S. Ramanath.The first phase of the Startup Village is expected to be inaugurated by February this year and the first batch would be inducted by April. [via]

This is also India’s first public-private partnership (PPP) telecom business incubator.

Read: MobMe story (From selling Prepaid SIM cards to Building Telecom Business )

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Sequoia Capital Invests in Knowlarity, Cloud Telephony Startup

Sequoia Capital has invested in Knowlarity, cloud telephony startup. Started in 2009, Knowlarity has launched couple of products focused on SMBs (SuperFAX, VirtualReceptionist, SuperConference).

The company claims to have over 40,000 clients across different sectors (including Pepsi, P&G) and the current round of funding will be used to expand in different geographies (Thailand/Brazil).

At the heart of Knowlarity is a cloud telephony platform called “Knowlus”. This end- to- end platform has been developed in-house using open source technologies. Knowlus has proved faster and flexible than any of the competing platforms. Company’s mission is to deliver ground-breaking telephony solutions over knowlus to improve the way businesses use phones in India.

 

At Pluggd.in, we have used the service and while the service works phenomenally well – we’d recommend the team to revisit the pricing, which is current done on an annual basis (and potentially defeats the purpose of SAAS based service).

How much would you like to pay for an online FAX based service?

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eTechies Secures $2 mn Series A funding from Inventus Capital Partners

eTechies, managed IT helpdesk for SMB and Consumer segment has raised Series A, $2mn funding from Inventus Capital Partners. eTechies.in is India’s first organized “Door-step, Online and phone” technical support & repair service for Desktops, Laptops, Printers and other digital devices and earlier raised angel money from Rajan Anandan, Google India head.

If you look at the IT cost of SMB segment, almost a half goes in procuring PCs/Laptops and networking solutions and almost 20% goes towards servers, printers and peripherals – a branded support/service surely has a huge growth opportunity in India.

“A service platform unavailable to Indian consumers & SMBs till now, eTechies.in provides instant support at the door step or remote over the internet with capabilities to service, support, and repair computing devices like PCs, MACs, Servers, Printers, Routers, iPads, etc.” Rohit Chaudhary, Co-Founder & CEO, eTechies.in. “While the Consumers & SMBs so far had to rely upon the disorganized service providers offering limited tech support & without the surety of timely professional services and accurate resolution to problems; eTechies.in offers cost effective professional full suite of end-to-end service, support and repair. For SMBs, where manpower cost is a major hindrance towards setting-up efficient internal IT teams, eTechies.in steps-in to provide holistic and customized IT solutions and support. With certified trained engineers, eTechies.in attends to and helps resolve problems within stipulated enterprise class SLAs, never before experienced.”

John Dougery and Parag Dhol of Inventus Capital will join the eTechies’ board.

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Singapore’s YES! Startup seed fund no more, resurrects as ACE Startups

The YES! Startup scheme, a government seed fund that has been around since 2008, is no more. It is being replaced by ACE Startups, which will accept applications from 1st February.

The new initiative was announced at a press conference today, and is positioned as an improvement on YES! Startup.

While YES! had an upper age limit of 26, ACE will do away with this requirement to cater to older applicants like mid-career professionals, retirees, and seniors.

Funding of up to $50,000 per startup will be provided by the initiative, which will be given in several tranches, subject to the hitting of milestones.

The Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE) is a private-public partnership formed in 2003 to create an entrepreneurial Singapore. It is headed by Teo Ser Luck, Minister of State for the Ministry of Trade and Industry. The ACE committee consists of a mix of entrepreneurs and civil servants.

The YES! scheme was previously administered by SPRING Singapore, a government agency that helps Singapore enterprises grow.

Like YES!, the ACE scheme will require entrepreneurs to match the funds at a 70:30 ratio. That is to say, in order to receive S$50,000, entrepreneurs must provide S$21,429 from their own pockets.

A key change in evaluation criteria is that startups will be judged not so much on technological innovation”, but on differentiation. Which means businesses that are not technologically inclined but have good product differentiation that can create a new path in the market will now stand s higher chance of getting selected.

“So long as an entrepreneur can set his business apart and be differentiated from his competitors, he can build a competitive edge and be successful in his venture,” said Minister Teo.

ACE also hopes to cut down on the bureaucracy and excessive paperwork that many entrepreneurs faced when applying for the YES! fund. Also, in the past, startups would need to submit a full business plan with financials to apply for funding. This is no longer the case, although applicants must still submit detailed information about their business idea.

ACE hopes to fund up to 500 startups, and Minister Teo hopes all the funds will be administered sooner rather than later.

Beyond funding, the scheme will provide networking and mentorship for startups to grow their business. The startups under the scheme will be guided by established entrepreneurs which head the various ACE sub-committees.

Dr Steven Fang of Cordlife will head the mentorship sub-committee. He hopes to eventually rope in entrepreneurs not just from Singapore, but from around the world as far as Silicon Valley.

He will also ensure startups get one-on-one mentorships. An entrepreneur, for example, can have multiple one-on-one mentorships at once, with entrepreneurs that have different expertise.

Deadline for the first round of application is 29th February, 2012. The website for ACE Startups is will be: www.ace.sg/acestartups.

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Group Buyers in Mainland China Love Hot Pot and Other Asians Love Being Beautiful

Unique Daily Deal aggregator and analytics platform for Asia and Oceania, Dataotuan has released their December 2011 report.

The Chinese Daily Deal Market in December 2011, Special – 2011 overview China and SE-Asia-dec-2011

View more presentations from dataotuan

Besides focusing on the movements in market share position by the big players in China, I think a different and interesting trend to pick up on, is the difference in buying behavior between Mainland Chinese and other Asian countries.

According to Dataotuan, Chinese deal hungry buyers are buying hotpot (11%), travel (10%) and beauty (7%) deals the most. However Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia are all buying beauty deals the most.

Such a trend is an interesting reflection on the state of the country and what people care about.  Right now China is enduring Winter, so enjoying hotpot with friends and family naturally makes sense. In Beijing, popular hotpot restaurants like Shabu Shabu and Haidilao are always packed with people.

However since Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia are all further south and enjoy a more tropical and humid climate, hotpot isn’t big on the agenda, but being beautiful is. Deals for beauty account for 11% in Taiwan, 21% in Philippines, 18% in Singapore and 21% in Malaysia. Why is this? This must point to the fact that most buyers are female and they care about the way they look like very much. When I travel around Asia and visit Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea I’m amazed by how much advertising there is for beauty products, plastic surgery, body sculpting etc. and is a point about how appearance is very engrained into the culture. Comparatively, I feel the beauty industry in China is still in its early stages but will grow rapidly, for now eating is a priority!

Related posts:

1. The Struggling Group Buying Model in China – Gaopeng the Biggest Victim
2. Beijing Has Quantity But Shanghai has Quality in China’s Group Buying Market
3. Meituan Delivers US$ 15M Sales Record In July

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Meituan is China’s King of the Deals, Ending 2011 On a High

The Chinese group-buying site Meituan has ended 2011 as the market leader in this highly competitive sector in the month of December. And so if we look back at the previous year, Meituan can be crowned the daily deals king in China by a tiny fraction from its main rival, Lashou.

These stats come from the group buy aggregator and analytics company, Dataotuan. For the December figures it looked at 125 deals sites across 345 cities.

Last month saw the further rise of 55Tuan, rising to be second in terms of market share. Lashou, once the leader in this industry, has suffered quite a knock, dropping down to fourth:

Lashou’s drop might well be due to a lack of popular deals. That’s something that Dianping, Nuomi, and Meituan are doing – as they often seem to do – very well:

Compared to the last time we looked at the deals market in the country, the average price of a deal went up a meagre 3RMB to now be at 140RMB (US$22):

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2011 Daily Deals Sector in Summary

Looking at 2011 as a whole, Dataotuan observes that the top 10 deals sites take 71.8 percent market share of the whole industry – while the top 11 to 20-placed websites fight over 16.7 percent share. The remaining crumbs are scrapped over by literally thousands of rivals:

So, despite a number of controversies at individual Chinese deals sites, and industry-wide issues such as customer complaints and some sites way behind in paying merchants, the whole sector has somewhat stabilized and a clear hierarchy has been plotted out. But that doesn’t mean that 2012 will be any less competitive.

For the full stats, plus some insights from deals sites across Asia, hit the source link below.

[Source: Dataotuan]

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