Zalora Rockets to Indonesia and 6 Other Asian Countries

Zalora, a clone of Zappos by Rocket Internet has gone live in Indonesia, as well as in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. Like Zappos, Zalora wants to be the place to shop for shoes and fashion online.

I specifically looked at Zalora Indonesia, which is acquiring fashion brands and merchants quickly. At the same time it is building its name with Google and Facebook ads and so far has been pretty successful in doing so. It has several brands on its list already, ranging from (X)S.M.L to Nike. It also has more than 55,000 likes already on its Facebook page.

Razi Thalib, the VP of online marketing and product, explained a little more about Zalora Indonesia when we asked whether or not it’s a Zappos clone.

We don’t have any thoughts on [that]. Our only objective is to become Indonesia’s best online fashion mega-store. Our goal to bring style and fashion to everyone. Branded products form a big part of our goal but is not our only focus. It is a difficult challenge (regarding payment system) and to be honest we’re not sure we can solve them [that]. We do hope that by attempting to solve the challenges for e-commerce locally (e.g. mass awareness, payments, logistics et al) Zalora will help pave the way for a positive shift in Indonesia towards mass online shopping adoption.

With Go-jek Indonesia as its logistic partner and Nadiem Makarim (co-founder of Go-jek) sitting as CEO of Zalora Indonesia, we can be sure Zalora Indonesia will not be having problems regarding its promise to give free shipping and returns if you are unsatisfied with the products you bought.

E-commerce in Indonesia is a land of competition but the potential is huge only time can tell who the winners of the battle will be.

Startup Asia Jakarta will hold a panel regarding e-commerce in Indonesia. Please join us.

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Exclusive: Samsung to launch its own online store in India

After Nokia’s partnership with Indiatimes to launch an official estore, Samsung is working on launching its own online store, https://www.samsungindiaestore.com. All orders on the Samsung India eStore are being executed by Savex computers limited, (national distributor for Samsung India Electronics) which will also handle the delivery and logistics part of the shopping experience.

The site currently lists Samsung products under Mobiles, Tablets, Laptops, Netbooks and Accessories category and offers free shipping (important to note that they do not sell home appliance products online).

As far as pricing is concerned, the products are priced a bit higher than other ecommerce merchants (like Flipkart/Infibeam). But if you are the kind who always goes to original brand stores in the offline world, this serves as the online version of the same.

Though the online store hasn’t been announced officially (most of the products are ‘out of stock’), we certainly hope that Samsung goes a good job of integrating the domain, Samsung.com with its online store passing on the relevant traffic to the estore.

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India’s Internet Economy Grew at 23%, To Contribute 5.6% to GDP by 2016

India’s Internet economy grew at 23% making it the second fastest among the G-20 countries.

Overall, the Internet economy in the developed markets of the G-20 will grow at an annual rate of 8 percent over the next five years, far outpacing just about every traditional economic sector, producing both wealth and jobs. China and India stand out for their enormous Internet-related exports—China in goods, India in services—which propel their Internet-economy rankings toward the top of the chart.

As per a report by BCG, Internet economy will contribute a total of $4.2 trillion to the G-20’s total GDP in 2016. “If it were a national economy, it would rank in the world’s top five, behind only the U.S., China, India, and Japan, and ahead of Germany”. The report projects that by 2016 the Internet economy in the EU-27 and India will leapfrog into fourth and fifth place, respectively. Japan and the U.S. will grow more slowly and drop to sixth and seventh, respectively.

Internet Economy in India

By 2016, the Internet economy will largely be driven by consumers, followed by exports.

 

India Online: The Retail Opportunity

Retail represents almost one-third of total GDP in the G-20, and online retail contributes a significant and increasing share in many countries.

In 2010, the share of online retail in India was only 0.4%, but is expected to touch $84Bn (4.5%) by 2016.

Overall, the report projects that India’s Internet economy will contribute 5.6% to country’s GDP by 2016.

[source]

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Worldspace is back in India, on Vodafone Network

Worldspace shut down its service in 2009 (December 31st) and the ‘Worldspace’ brand name was acquired by Bangalore based Timbre Media, which has now launched Worldspace on Vodafone network enabling Vodafone subscribers to listen to more than 1,00,000 songs on 10 stations on their mobile phone.

Vodafone Pug

“A monthly rental of Rs 30 will be charged for the service, where user gets 300 minutes of listening. After 300 minutes, user can take a top up of Rs 7, where he will get 70 minutes free of listening time” [source].

Aside, Saragama owns 10% stake in Timbre media, which also offers customized radio content for multiple broadcast platforms (like FM stations, DTH, operators etc).

Long story short, your Worldspace device (if you still have them) cannot be resurrected, but the good news (and we certainly hope) is that the genre based music is back in India.

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Japan’s Web News Week 10

This week's Japanese Web/IT related news which we did not write as a dedicated article.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Tokyo Metropolitan Police To Begin Twitter For Disaster-Releaf Planned In 2012
• Kanazawa College of Art Enrollment and Graduate by the same students. via @U2game_Sawagi

  

  

• Iine Manga With Mecha-Zuckerburg - The title is "Iine Kojiki(begger)". "Iine" is "Like" on Japanese Facebook.

  

• Applise - Android App Review For Japanese Women Opens via MyNavi
• Drug Dealing Community On Mixi Exposed
• Click Affiliate Program Heso-click Shuts Down Without Advanced Notice

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

Japan’s Web News Week 10

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Ang Mo Kio, selling Singaporean hawker fare, opens in the Philippines

Hainanese chicken rice

Singapore has always had a proud heritage of food entrepreneurs in decades past — accounting for the abundance of affordable hawker fare in the city streets.

Now, entrepreneur Ritchie Baldonado has brought the country’s hawker cuisine to a shopping mall in the Philippines, reported Business World Online.

He’s named the restaurant “Ang Mo Kio”, after a heartland housing estate in Singapore, which happens to have a lot of good food.

Opened in Ortigas Center in February, the restaurant has seen brisk business so far.

They cook about 20 to 30 whole chickens on weekdays for their Hainanese Chicken Rice dish, and 60 to 70 on weekends.

Laksa, a spicy noodle soup, and Chili Crab, are also popular items. The restaurant only serves 30 dishes of laksa a day, and they’re all sold before 6pm.

The restaurant kitchen is headed by Singaporean executive chef Justin Seah. A typical meal for two would cost around P1,000 (US$23).

Photo: avlxyz

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Finnish Embassy Runs Personified Finland Illustration Contest On Twitter

Finish embassy in Japan, who recently runs a Twitter account(@FinEmbTokyo) with folksy tweets and getting popular by showing deep understandings to Japanese subcultures. On February, they introduced to its followers Suomi-neito, a personified Finnish land, and soon later by getting feedback, began an official Suomi-neito illustration contest.

On March 1 2012, Finnish embassy awarded a few illustrations out of 35 applicants.

The grand prix is by @ba66ie.

See all 5 awarded Suomi-neito-es on the embassy site [J].

See Also:

2-channellers See A Girl In Great Britain

Finnish Embassy Runs Personified Finland Illustration Contest On Twitter

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Renren Launches a Social Travel Platform and App, Wants to Take a Trip

China’s biggest Facebook-like social network, Renren (NYSE:RENN), has launched a good-looking social travel app and site for its users. Called Fengche – meaning ‘windmill’ – it allows users to make a sort of photographic diary of their travels, which friends can then check out and comment upon.

Fengche comes with apps for Android and iPhone, where you can create your travel journal whilst still on the move – as indicated by the prominence of the central, green ‘camera’ button (pictured below). A look at the Fengche.com website reveals that individual trips created by users are then presented as sets – appearing like a cross between Flickr and Pinterest – and that its main purpose is for browsing. It seems that most of the creation happens in the apps.

Renren’s COO, Liu Jian, told Chinese media that Fengche was a natural expansion of its social media ecosystem, and that the content created by its users would have a far-reaching influence in the travel and tourism market.

The new social travel platform resembles the travel diary app AoYouJi which launched only very recently, after we previewed it at the end of last year – though AoYouJi focuses more on geo-tagging. Nonetheless, this might be bad news for the startup. Renren’s Fengche also treads on the toes of smaller sites like Weyup, which made a localized version of the Gogobot travel community.

Having been in private beta for a while, Fengche is launching with over 2,500 trips being documented and posted to the site. Interestingly, the Renren ownership is being played down, perhaps to give this new venture a chance to bring in new users to the Facebook-like site at a time when Chinese web users have been more keen on engaging on microblogs like Sina Weibo.

Grab the Fengche app for iOS or Android from the homepage.

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