GREE Announces Partnerships with Chinese and Korean Game Developers

GREE area at Tokyo Game Show

Japanese mobile gaming company GREE (TYO:3632) has today announced multiple partnerships with leading social/mobile game developers in Korea and Greater China. The partnerships will result in 12 new iOS and Android titles coming to the new GREE platform when it launches later this year, we’re told between April and June.

Among the most prominent of these titles on the way is Punchbox’s Fishing Joy which recently celebrated its 30 millionth download just last month [1]. The complete list of companies and games coming to the new GREE platform are listed below:

Company	Game	Location
Beijing Astepgame Co. Ltd	Three Kingdoms TD Fate of Wei	Beijing China
Beijing Pearlinpalm Information Technology Co., Ltd.	Pearl Heroes – The Three Kingdoms	Beijing China
Boyaa Interactive International Limited	Boyaa Texas Poker	Hong Kong
Company 100, Inc.	Buddy Rush	Gyeonggii, South Korea
Company 100, Inc.	Cross Counter	Gyeonggii, South Korea
Haypi Co., Ltd.	Haypi Kingdom	Shanghai, China
Hoolai Game Limited	Rise Of Olympia	Beijing, China
iFree Studio Limited	Emross War	Hong Kong
Pictosoft Co., Ltd.	Stylish Sprint	Seoul, South Korea
Chukong Technology Co., Ltd. (PunchBox)	Fishing Joy X	Beijing, China
Shanghai MUHE Network Technology Co., Ltd.	Tap Three Kingdoms	Shanghai, China
Something Big Technology Co., Ltd.	Sanguo Mobile	Shanghai, China

Interestingly GREE says that these games will be first available in English, with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages “under consideration.” And while it’s great to see GREE increase its game offerings, we’ll have to wait and see how well these games created in Asia will be received in places like the US and Europe. Note that four of the games listed above are of the “three kingdoms” variety.

GREE also recently announced that it will be in attendance at E3 in Los Angeles this June. We expect that its global platform will be ready by then, and will be front and center at the show. After the company’s acquisition of Open Feint, there are now almost 190 million users under the GREE Group umbrella.

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1. Note that GREE specifies Fishing Joy X in its announcement, so I assume this could be a new version.  ↩

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Meet Pigeonhole Live, an App That Can Make Conferences Smarter, More Transparent

Pigeonhole Live is a mobile, real-time conference question and answer (Q&A) tool. It enables attendees at conferences to post and vote for questions using their mobile devices on mobile browsers. Speakers can then identify the more popular and important questions to address immediately at conferences, which allows a larger degree of transparency and communication between the audience and speakers.

Apart from addressing burning questions posed by the public, Pigeonhole Live eradicates those annoying people who would hog microphones at conferences — asking senseless questions and annoying statements, drowning those intelligent questions that could possibly enlighten the audience and resonate with the general crowd’s interest. Pigeonhole Live also caters to shy people who prefer to be anonymous, perhaps less confident in their questions.

I spoke to co-founder of Pigeonhole Live, Joon Yeng, at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Enterprise Incubator where he told me that the idea came about when he and Lyon Lim (co-founder) attended a Singapore conference which was broadcast live from Silicon Valley. Halfway through the conference, the feed broke down and the audience was annoyed because they were unable to see the questions that were posted.

Pigeonhole Live has been used at more than 100 events so far. The startup team works a lot with local government agencies such as Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), and the Singapore Ministry of Health, for their work plan seminars and town hall meetings. Due to the anonymity factor, it was effective at engaging the audience. A lot of questions were brought up, allowing transparent communication between the upper and lower management. Pigeonhole will also be used at the upcoming Demo Asia happening later this month.

The startup has also recently released a new polling feature which is currently being used by local ChannelNewAsia programme, Talking Point – The Vote, where people can vote in polls and add in their comments about political and cultural issues (see screenshots below). Users of Pigeonhole can either choose to disclose their identity through third-party logins such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, or not do so at all.

Both Joon and Lyon are NUS Overseas Colleges innovative Local Entreprise Achiever Development (iLEAD) program graduates and their startup received S$50,000 in October 2010 under the YES! Startup fund.

Pigeonhole promises more features to be rolled out for a global audience in the near future and if you guys are keen, do visit their website to check it out.

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Quick snapshot of Junglee traffic 2 weeks after the launch [It's Falling]

Junglee set the jungle on fire and while its too early to say whether Junglee can really be a significant threat to Indian ecommerce players, we decided to take a look at the site traffic since the day it was launched.

Junglee: Traffic Rank

Junglee: Traffic Rank

Falling since the launch. It’s obviously difficult to sustain the traffic that Junglee got during the launch phase, but the bigger challenge for them lies in creating a destination site (after all, they are a price comparison service).

Junglee: Traffic Reach

Junglee Traffic : Daily Reach

Junglee: Pageviews

Junglee Traffic : Daily Pageviews

Of course, we have our own view on Alexa and whether it can be trusted or not, so we also looked at Google trends to get an approximate idea and here are the results:

Junglee Traffic from Google Trends

Junglee: The new new destination site?

Two weeks into the launch is too early to talk about a company future, but for Junglee to be a huge success, it has to replace Google and become a defacto/starting point for consumers to compare prices vis-à-vis features of mobiles etc and this ain’t a 1 week story. If lucky, Junglee can achieve the destination site status in a year or so – but do not expect magic so soon.

What’s your take on Junglee? Is it sticky enough? Are you still visiting the site, now that the initial euphoria is over?

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China’s Mobile Ad Network, Madhouse Launches in India

Chinese mobile ad network, Madhouse has launched its operations in India and the company plans to open offices across 3 cities to service brands across the spectrum.

Madhouse India aims to leverage the opportunity of using mobile as a mass media device given that there are more than 850 million mobile connections in the country. Current barriers to mobile marketing include the dearth of scaled solutions in Data, Voice and Text; harmonizing the different operating systems with multiple stake holders across mobile inventory; and lack of established tools and systems, which makes it difficult to answer the question of how this medium can be leveraged by advertisers to reach out to their consumers.
Using Madhouse, clients can look forward to complete mobile solutions across the spectrum of paid, owned and earned media on feature phones, smart phones and tablets. The company provides services across all operating systems with precise targeting by geography, user demographics and psychographics to ensure minimal media wastage.

“We see tremendous growth and potential in India and are fully committed to investing in this market. With the right local partners, we believe that our technology and operational expertise can be leveraged to serve the unique mobile marketing needs of clients. In China, we have been working with partners such as Rovio, EA, China Unicom’s app store, and ad agencies to continually grow our leadership position. Similarly in India, we value our association with local partners to help develop and take leadership in this market.” [Mr. Joshua Maa, Founder & CEO, Madhouse]

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Cisco Invests in Qyuki, Startup by A R Rahman and Shekhar Kapur

Cisco has invested in Qyuki, a digital media startup by A R Rahman and Shekhar Kapur. As per ET, Cisco made an investment of Rs 27 crore in Qyuki, for 17% equity (i.e. valued at INR 160 Cr) in the creative social media platform that is expected to go live in May.

Qyuki will enable cocreation of creative content enabling users to cocreate music and add lyrics/music etc. independently.

“Qyuki will not be as inert as Facebook or as passive as You-Tube. We want to shepherd people’s creativity to create new films and score music collaboratively,” [Shekhar Kapur]

Another Indian startup, Muziboo also offers a similar service, though one would expect Qyuki to bring the marketplace approach to creative business and bring music producers to the table.

[Thanks Dhruv Goyal for the tip.]

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Monster League For Mig33 Released by Agate Studio

Agate Studio has launched its Monster League game on the mig33 platform, where users can play as a professional football coach for free. Within one week of soft launching, Monster League has attracted 10,000 users, 70 percent of them are coming from Indonesia. The remaining 30 percent are coming from regions like Nepal, Bangladesh, and Mozambique.

This distribution doesn’t come as a surprise since mig33 has 50 million users, with more than 30 million from Indonesia. Besides loving all things mobile, users are very young and very social — and I haven’t even mentioned their love for football.

Monster League, as explained in the announcement, is a world full of monsters where (strangely) football is everything. This football simulation game is a unique blend of football and Tamagochi, the handheld virtual pet simulation game. The main difference here is that you can train your monster to be a legendary football player. This Tamagochi-style twist on the game is a fascinating angle, and the characters are very cute.

Agate Studio has released a wide array of games to date, ranging from from Urban Fatburner, NyanyiYuk and Football Saga, to Sexy Witch and Smash Mania. They are a part of the mig33 Developer Program with GREE. They are one of the most successful game studios in Indonesia, founded back in 2009.

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