China’s Biggest Pinterest Clone Hints at Tie-Up With Alibaba’s eTao

Among the swarm of Pinterest clones in China in recent months, the largest independent/startup one is Mogujie with six million registered users. Its CEO and founder, Chen Qi, has hinted at a big development for his site in a recent tweet on his Weibo [1] account. He says that Mogujie will tie-up with eTao, the product search engine run by e-commerce giant Alibaba, for what promises to be an interesting social commerce venture.

Chen’s teaser (pictured below) says, in my rough translation:

Excitedly, I can reveal a new product that’s being developed, which is an open-platform shopping guide service, a deep collaboration between eTao and Mogujie. The two teams together have been secretly developing this for three months, and it’ll soon launch.

Having independently checked the rumor with another source, we can say that this seems very likely to happen just as Mr. Chen hints. Well, he did give a pretty massive hint. Since eTao is an industry-wide product search engine, this’ll likely cover other sites such as Dangdang (NYSE:DANG) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) China – though not the dissenting 360Buy or Suning – and not just the company’s own Taobao and Tmall. The Mogujie and eTao tie-up, in whatever form it ultimately takes, could possibly turn out to be the most profitable and trafficked implementation of a social pinboard – i.e. Pinterest-like – site we’ve ever seen.

The original Pinterest itself is proving effective as a great traffic driver; and in China, Renren’s own clone, called Plaza, is filled with links to users’ Taobao shops and other online stores. And so it makes sense that Alibaba would want to get involved more directly in a social medium that seems popular with women and can be a powerful tool for steering these women to e-commerce sites. We’ll update if we hear any more info.

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1. Chen Qi’s Weibo is @SharkUI, and his specific tweet is here ↩

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Startups : If you don’t have competition, you have more chances of failure!

The first question you hear as a startup is ‘What if your competition starts doing what you do’. Many startups will say ‘We don’t have competitors or we are first in the market or we have X innovation and hence no competitor’.

Chasing Customers

Reality is you have plenty of competitors. Politely, candidly you should say ‘having competitor validates market need & we will survive-prosper-lead’! As a  Startup , you are introducing a solution for which you need a market. You should be worried if you claim you have no competitors.

Customer will hate you if you don’t have competitors, you will be seen as monopolistic, average service, high cost, low supportive company! The reason being they don’t know how good you are by benchmarking with your competitor(s).

Your first few investors (friends, family) will doubt your startup potential as they can’t visually verify scope of growth or proof of it elsewhere. Everything you do would be seen as random, impractical, too optimistic gamble.

Your product would slowly be less creative & less user driven as you won’t be able to offer a disruptive model due to lack of market feedback on how it fares vs other products, what other way same service can be delivered. For example, think how it would be if 37signals was the only startup doing project management solution for decades! Now imagine how Podio/Zoho have taken different approach to similar service hence offering wealth of knowledge & feedback to 37signals. “No competitor” means you will dig your own grave.

Also, you will have biggest issues in attracting top talents.

Your startup will be doing all the hard work to create market, opportunities, rather than co-creating the same in far less cost (acquisition & business development). This high cost would mean your startup is in danger of early death unless your product/ service had some early avatar /competitors to which customers can relate to.

You will suffer due to lack of ecosystem & having to do most related work on your own.

Stand up and admit you have competitor(s) whom you love /hate /ignore /fight.

[Guest article contributed by Santosh Panda, founder of Ayojak. Reproduced from his blog.]

And if you still think you do not have a competition, read this piece: Substitutes vs. Alternatives – Understand your Competition Better

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Abandoned Shopping Cart Remarketing : See how ecommerce companies are using it to increase conversions

Remarketing is typically synonymous with online advertising wherein if a customer browses your website and leaves without making a purchase then you can follow the customer by displaying him your ads when he is browsing other websites. I have come across many websites that have smartly employed this new online marketing tool.

There’s another interesting form of remarketing (email remarketing) which is the subject of my latest experiment. If a customer visits your website, browses your catalogue, adds a product to the shopping cart, enters his email address but doesn’t complete the transaction (could be due to a lack of interest or some error during the payment process or even a broken internet connection), the situation is commonly known as abandoned cart. While most e-commerce sites would consider this as just another case of a failed conversion, the smarter ones would take it up as an opportunity to re-engage the customer so that he can complete his purchase. Here’s how:

Since you have the customer’s email address and are aware of the products that he added to his shopping cart, you can send him a reminder email about his incomplete order and give him a single click option to resume his shopping on your website from exactly the same point where he left.

I did a simple experiment on some of the popular Indian e-commerce sites to figure out which ones are indeed using email remarketing to win back customers. I added a product to my shopping cart on each of these sites but didn’t make the payment.

Among the few Indian e-commerce websites that I tried this experiment on, I found Flipkart.com and Myntra.com to be using the remarketing technique for their abandoned shopping carts. Their reminder email listed all the products that were present in the shopping cart. The email had a clear message and call to action for the user to resume his transaction. The price/payment value of the products was not mentioned though. Would have liked to see that as well.

Know of more such implementations? Please share.

[Guest article contributed by Abhishek Rajan, General Manager at One97 Communications. He earlier contributed: Password security and Indian Ecommerce Companies].

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Capcom Bringing it in Browsers: Onimusha Soul Coming this Summer

Japanese game developer Capcom (TYO:9697) announced today that it will be entering the browser game market come this summer, with its first title Onimusha Soul slated for a June 28 release.

The Onimusha samurai survival game first appeared on PlayStation 2 in 2001 and since then has been one of the companies more popular franchises. The browser based Onimusha Soul will feature social and cooperative elements, with the possibility of fighting in groups based on Japan’s prefectures. The graphics for the game are generated using the Unity 3D development engine. It will have paid in-game content, though it is ostensibly free to play.

Capcom aims to distribute the title for PCs at first, and smartphones to follow in August. It was just last year that the company stated that it needed to look outside Japan for bigger growth opportunities. And while there wasn’t any indication that this browser title would be marketed for audiences outside Japan, Capcom has made a push on the smartphone platform with wide-appeal titles like Smurfs’ Village, Snoopy’s Street Fair, and Street Fighter IV.

The company says that it wants to hit 30 billion yen ($367 million) in sales of online content by 2015.

Capcom sales by region, 2000-2010 (millions of yen)

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Yetizen says Frenzoo is in the game

Photo: BBGSite.com

Yetizen’s annual GDC startup contest “Get in the Game” saw Hong Kong-based Frenzoo walking away with the top award.

Frenzoo, the Hong Kong-based 3D fashion and lifestyle game creator, has won the Yetizen’s annual “Get in the Game” startup contest at GDC 2012. The contest’s judging panel included Terence Fung from Zynga, Michael Chang from Electronic Arts and Tim Chang from the Mayfield Fund.

Simon Newstead, CEO of Frenzoo, mentioned that it was great to receive validation and feedback from the industry veterans. Frenzoo was an alumni of e27′s unConference 2009, now known as Echelon.

Yetizen is a gaming startup accelerator based in the Bay Area. We recently did an interview with Yetizen’s cofounder, Sana Choudary, where she mentioned that they are seeing more promise in Asia. Looks like Frenzoo is out proving them right. Check out a video of Frenzoo’s mobile game, Dress Me Girl.

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Nokia’s SEC Filing Reveals Phone Sales Down 20% in China in 2011

It seems that 2010 was Nokia’s zenith in China, with Nokia’s new SEC filing for full year 2011 revealing that last year proved to be the start of an ugly fall from grace.

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) net device sales in the Greater China area shrank 18 percent from 2010 to 2011, and the number of devices sold dropped by 20 percent. Looking at net sales for phones by area, China accounts for 17 percent of revenue – down just one percentage point from 2010 – to make it the third most important area for the company. But, as China’s growing middle-classes switch to Android or iOS in growing numbers, Nokia’s situation in the middle kingdom is a lot more critical than its numbers suggest. Here are graphs we’ve made showing changes in devices sold (in millions) and revenue from 2009 to 2011:

The only number going up in China was net sales for the Nokia Siemens Network business, which saw 1 percent growth in the country. But the SEC filing – grab the PDF document here – notes that the acquisition of the majority of Motorola Solutions’ wireless network infrastructure assets in the middle of 2011 means that the year’s numbers are not directly comparable to 2010’s.

The global picture was no less gloomy, as Nokia posted a US$1.4 billion operating loss. The company sold a grand total of 417.1 million devices, down 8 percent year-on-year. Interestingly, its feature-phones suffered the least (down 3 percent to 339.8 million units shipped), while its smartphones – now using either Symbian or the WP7 platform – suffered the most, plummeting 25 percent from 2010 to 2011 to hit 77.3 million devices.

Nokia’s WP7-powered phones are due to hit China this month or next, giving the phones the rest of the year to rescue, perhaps, Nokia’s 2012 numbers.

Here are the full revenue and devices sold stats, with China highlighted in yellow:

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App42 is a platform agnostic PAAS provider that wants to provide plumbing to app developers

It’s not every day that one gets to profile startups that are doing very cool stuff in the platform space. While Platform (henceforth referred to as the P word) is pretty much an abused word with everyone using it left, right and center – once in a while there is a player who comes up with a product that looks holistic and promising.

App42 is one such platform which, in their own words “is a Unified PaaS (Platform as a Service) platform for Mobile & Web applications. Currently we have created over 180+ Cloud API’s with SDK’s for all popular platforms and languages, very soon we will be providing a deployment and execution environment for custom server side code using our Shared Cloud and Dedicated Cloud Containers.
Complete server side complexities are taken care by us allowing the App developer to focus on the UI and on their business functionality. Whether you are an iOS, Android or HTML5 App developer or developing SaaS and Enterprise Applications using popular languages like Java, Groovy, PHP, Ruby or python, our API’s will provide Technical as well as Business Services which you can use out of the box with minimal configuration and integrate in your App code.”

While a lot of their stuff is under development, App42 looks to provide any developer an abstraction layer so that he/she can focus on the business logic and UI without bothering too much about the plumbing. Most complex app developers (not the alarm clock developer types) spend a lot of time writing plumbing around their server components e.g. logging, user session management and App42 wants to take away that load from the developers, helping them focus more on business logic.

App42 Ecosystem

There are multiple components, which form the App42 Ecosystem.

1. App42 Cloud API’s:

The App42 Cloud API’s consists of a REST based service which has a JSON and XML interface. There are around 16+ modules with over 180+ API’s e.g. User, Session Management, Storage, Recommendation, Photo Gallery, Queue / Message, Game, Geo Spatial, AppTab – Subscription & Billing Engine etc. which will help developers to develop their applications; irrespective of the type of App they are developing. SDK’s are provided for all popular languages and platforms which will enable easy integration of the API’s into the App code. With just a few lines of code, the App developer gets access to services from a simple to complex technical as well as business services.

2. AppHQ – App42 Management Console

The App42 Management Console is an Admin UI interface allowing App developers to create Apps and manage them. It also allows viewing of the content created by the usage of API. For e.g. if an Album is created in Photo Gallery and Photos are added, all the Album information and Photo information which are stored on the cloud will be visible on AppHQ. Only view and delete functionality is supported in this release. For a few services like Queue, AppTab – Usage based Charging Scheme, Email Configuration, Add functionality is supported. It also gives detailed reporting on Charging usage for AppTab for various types of schemes e.g. Level, Feature, Storage, Bandwidth, License etc.

3. AppHawk – Cloud Project Management and Collaboration Service

One of the tools which every App developer requires is a tool to manage the project users, tasks, requirements, increments, estimation, costing, documents and collaboration tools for communication and sharing information. AppHawk gives a simple intuitive interface, using which an App Developer can start managing his projects in a few minutes. Apart from managing users, requirements, increments, estimation, Tasks, To-do’s, it also allows the App developer to do cost estimation for Cloud Resources, which has recurring cost e.g. Cloud Datacenter, AppStore/Market Place cost etc. For all App42 Cloud API registered users, currently AppHawk is a free service for 3 projects and unlimited users.
Developers who just want to use AppHawk, can access it directly from http://apphawk.shephertz.com – its currently in beta and free for 3 projects (and unlimited users).

Next in the line are  Federated, Shared and Dedicated Cloud Containers and AppClay, a mobile app generator.

In short, App42 is looking to address the full end to end ecosystem and not only niche needs. On the flip side, it would be interesting to compare with some offerings like Titanium Core and PhoneGap. While PhoneGap is a very basic app maker (I have never understood why people use it in the first place), there are lots of overlaps with Titanium – and it would be interesting to see how this space shapes up.

There is also the basic question of control and customization. Usually for specific needs, it is difficult to customize using platforms. While we haven’t used the offering yet, in other similar platforms customization has been the biggest roadblock to make complex apps.

So what do you think – is this startup going to crack the PaaS space with this offering? Try them out and let us know!

Lastly – I hope 42 is a tongue in cheek reference to “The secret of Life, Universe and Everything” as in HHGTG. If that’s the case – then respect!

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