The Average Chinese Smartphone User Makes $12,698 Per Year

Smartphone usage in China has exploded over the past few years. This year, China finally blew past the US to become the biggest consumer of smartphones, making up 20.7 percent of the global smartphone market to America’s paltry 20.6 percent. But even though many of them are made in China, these phones don’t come cheap. A recent ProsperChina survey found that smartphone users in China, on average, make about 80,000 RMB per year ($12,698).

Although that’s actually a pretty good yearly salary by Chinese standards, especially considering that smartphone users tend to be young, it might seem low to readers overseas. After all, an iPhone in China can run nearly $1,000 just for the device itself, depending in the model, options, and timing. But it’s worth noting that Chinese users typically pay much less for phone service than, say, Americans. Moreover, many Chinese smartphone users opt for cheaper 2G service rather than springing for pricier 3G plans.

The number does indiciate that the expansion of smartphone use in China could run up against a wall when the wealthier market is thoroughly saturated and people with lower incomes can’t afford the devices. But with more low-cost, high-powered devices appearing each year (see: Xiaomi), it’s likely smartphone use will continue to grow, and the average yearly salary of smartphone users may start to shrink.

[via Sina Tech]

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New iPad Arrives in India, South Korea, More Asian Nations This Month

According to Apple, its new iPad will launch officially in five Asian countries later this month. South Koreans will be among the first to grab one when it rolls out there this Friday (20th), while folks in India need to wait a week longer (27th). Here’s the full list of Asian arrival days for the iPad:

• Friday, April 20th: South Korea, Brunei, and Malaysia.
• Friday, April 27th: India, and Thailand.

In total, 12 countries around the globe are getting official shipments of the best-selling tablet this month. No word yet on when it’ll hit mainland China, leaving consumers there paying the ‘grey market’ rates for iPads brought over the border from Hong Kong – though demand hasn’t been that strong this time round.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) announcement did not mention specific localized prices for all the new markets. The US price starts at $499 for the base 16GB model of the “new” iPad in either black or white, while the previous generation iPad 2 has already dropped to $399. The new model was unveiled in early March by the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, who hailed the high-res “Retina” screen and the upgraded A5X processor.

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China Needs a Slice of Raspberry Pi

Mmmmmmm, pie.

Raspberry pie is delicious, and everyone should have a slice, but the title is not a typo, and what I’m here to talk about today is not real pie. It’s Raspberry Pi, a tiny computer being created by a UK company. It’s not exactly a powerhouse; in fact, it doesn’t even have a hard drive. But with the help of an SD card or flash drive, plus a TV and mouse/keyboard to connect it to, it becomes a functional computer that can play simple games, run most Linux software, and even surf the web. Here’s the best part: it costs $25. The developers are hoping it can be used to teach kids programming, but to me it seems like it could be used for much more than just that.

What does this have to do with China? While we spend a lot of time talking about China’s growing number of smartphone users and social media addicts, and it can be easy to forget that hundreds of millions of people here live in poverty. And poverty is defined as income of less than $361 per year for residents of rural areas.

Needless to say, people from impoverished and rural areas often don’t get access to the same quality of education that’s available in cities. They also don’t get access outside the classroom to computers and technology the way a wealthier city-dweller often would. This can put rural children at a severe disadvantage later in life when they’re competing with urban residents for jobs but don’t have the computer know-how to keep up. By know-how here I don’t mean programming skills, I just mean the general knowledge of how computers operate that comes with years of use.

It’s obvious that Raspberry Pi could help. $25 ought to be cheap enough for at least some rural Chinese school systems, and the opportunities it could afford poor kids — not just to learn programming — are enormous. And while it needs to be connected to a TV and keyboard to be used, keyboards are cheap and televisions are pretty widespread, even in China’s most rural areas. Plus, the $25 Raspberry Pi is actually made in China and then imported to the UK afterwards. Could that price be dropped even further for a similar product that was just sold domestically and didn’t have to incorporate overseas shipping? I suspect so, though probably not by much.

This is something Chinese NGOs, schools, and the government in general should be looking at very carefully. The price is right, the advantages are numerous, and the downsides practically nonexistent. In fact, by my quick-and-dirty calculations, China could give every impoverished person in the country a Raspberry Pi if the government were willing to spend just six percent of what it spends on the military each year.

That’s probably not realistic — after all, who wants to educate children when you can buy missiles — but it should be very feasible to outfit schools in poor areas with Raspberry Pis so that kids can get some hands-on time with computers, and even learn to program. I know that dessert-based placation of the poor has been out of style since Marie Antoinette’s head rolled out of the guillotine, but somehow I think that “Let them have pi!” could be a pretty successful policy. How about it, China?

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Zalora Faces Pressure, Oliver Samwer in Singapore To Motivate Team

The folks from Rocket Internet has already made waves in Europe,and they are now putting their clone factory in Southeast Asia. E-commerce players in the region should all tremble in fear. Or should they?

The folks from team Rocket has been launching quite a few e-commerce/service sites in the past few months: Zalora.com, Foodpanda.com, and Lazada.com. An insider, who wishes to remain anonymous [1], told me that the next product launching is Home24.sg, a site that deals with furniture. In fact, Home24’s Twitter account is already up and tweeting.

Rocket Internet now has a wide range of products and services focusing on many different countries: Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. The Samwer brothers are formidable with very successful track records, there’s no doubt about that. See the chart below from The Economist:

But is Rocket Internet doing well in Southeast Asia? I’m not so sure about the other products. But an insider told me that Zalora.com REALLY isn’t in a very good shape. So much so that Oliver Samwer was here in Singapore yesterday to give an eight-hour motivational talk to his team. A leaked memo (I paraphrased so it doesn’t reveal my source) reads as follow:

Hello all

Oliver Samwer is with us in Singapore today. We will have a meeting around 7.00pm. Please don’t leave the office. Oliver will also have meetings with individual teams until late tonight.

Meeting up with team late at night doesn’t spell any trouble, I know. But the meeting is probably triggered by complaints Zalora has received from its customers so far. These problems are brewing over on the Zalora Facebook page as my source pointed out. You have to switch the Facebook timeline to ‘Post by Others’ to read comments from customers. It doesn’t look good, with most of the complaints focused mainly on Zalora’s slow delivery and poor customer service. Just to show a few, here’s a comment on Zalora’s non-responsive service:

Hi, it’s been more a week (the Saturday morning after good Friday) that I have ordered something from you and I haven’t managed to login nor received an email. I wrote in to customer service on Friday last (with product description, my email and time and date of purchase). I thought the payment didn’t go through but confirmed with the bank payment has been made. Please reply, would appreciate if we can resolve this as soon as possible.

… and a complaint on technical issues:

Hi, I’ve registered and made an order, but have encountered some issues. 1, I have not received a confirmation email or receipt of my order, and 2, I cannot login to the website. Please assist. thank you.

…and here’s one customer who hasn’t received her goods for two weeks:

Hi, I have ordered a pair of shoes from Zalora two weeks ago. Till today, the pair of shoes has not arrived. Neither can I log or check my order status. Moreover, hope you guys will reply my email asap.

The above comments are all from Zalora Singapore Facebook page. Similar complains can be seen on its Malaysia page too. The Zalora Indonesia page looks fine, though.

Evidently, customers from Zalora Singapore and Malaysia aren’t too happy about the service so far. But to cut them some slack for a moment, shit happens in every business and we hope that the Samwer brothers will patch the faults soon. But it does make me wonder if Zalora can actually conquer the Southeast Asia market. The Samwer brothers may be the clone kings in Europe but Southeast Asia is a whole different animal — its people, market, and culture are vastly different from the western markets.

For e-commerce sites owners in Southeast Asia, perhaps you don’t have so much to fear. You have local knowledge as an advantage. The Samwer brothers aren’t here in Southeast Asia as often to drive and execute things as hard as any startup founder would do. But the brothers probably have hired super smart people to run their clones here. And that makes their battle an interesting one to watch.

The good news is that competition is usually good for consumers in the long run.

---

1. Read our policy on quoting anonymous sources.  ↩

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Microsoft paying developers to develop for Windows Phone

Photo:Dailytech

Microsoft is paying developers like Foursquare and the Cheezburger Network to develop for Windows Phone.

Depending on what type of application is being developed, costs can run as high as US$600,000 according to some developers.

Holger Luedorf is head of Business Development at Foursquare, and he was quoted by the New York Times as saying that they wouldn’t have developed a version for Windows Phone if Microsoft had not offered to pay the development costs. “We have very limited resources, and we have to put them toward the platforms with the biggest bang for our buck” He also went on to say “But we are a social network and it is incredibly important for us to be available on every platform.”

Microsoft’s Senior Marketing Manager for Windows Phone Casey McGee admitted that Microsoft has offered incentives for developers, but he did not go into specifics.

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Microsoft paying developers to develop for Windows Phone

Photo:Dailytech

Microsoft is paying developers like Foursquare and the Cheezburger Network to develop for Windows Phone.

Depending on what type of application is being developed, costs can run as high as US$600,000 according to some developers.

Holger Luedorf is head of Business Development at Foursquare, and he was quoted by the New York Times as saying that they wouldn’t have developed a version for Windows Phone if Microsoft had not offered to pay the development costs. “We have very limited resources, and we have to put them toward the platforms with the biggest bang for our buck” He also went on to say “But we are a social network and it is incredibly important for us to be available on every platform.”

Microsoft’s Senior Marketing Manager for Windows Phone Casey McGee admitted that Microsoft has offered incentives for developers, but he did not go into specifics.

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Singapore’s Tickled Media among world’s most democratic workplaces

Tickled Media, the company behind LiveJournal Asia and theAsianparent.com, has become the first Singapore company to make the WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces.

To become eligible for the list, employees from the company must complete an assessment evaluating their organisation’s practices. The test was developed based on a decade of research into what constitutes a democratic organization.

The certification is open to both for-profit and non-profit organizations which are operating for at least one full year and have five or more employees.

“WorldBlu is very impressed with Tickled Media’s dedication to democracy in the workplace combined with its outstanding year-on-year revenue growth,” said WorldBlu Founder and CEO, Traci Fenton.

Since transitioning their company towards being a democratic workplace a year ago, Tickled Media has seen revenues spike 800 percent.

Roshni Mahtani, the company’s CEO, explains: “Tickled Media’s democratic practices have made its employees happier. They want to come to work and they take ownership for what they do.”

The company has implemented a team “lunch and share” session every Friday where one employee gets a chance to share their thoughts on their choice topic while the rest listen, relax, and eat.

They also go on yearly holiday destination retreats to foster the company’s sense of unity and provide an opportunity for anyone to voice their  opinions or suggest improvements.

WorldBlu, founded in 1997, is a company that specializes in organizational democracy. 47 organizations from around the world, including Malaysia, India, and New Zealand, have been certified. Some prominent members include Zappos.com and DaVita.

The companies are rated based on the WorldBlu 10 Principles of Organisational Democracy, listed below:

1. Purpose and Vision
A democratic organization is clear about why it exists (its purpose) and where it is headed and what it hopes to achieve (its vision). These act as its true North, offering guidance and discipline to the organization’s direction.

2. Transparency
Say goodbye to the “secret society” mentality. Democratic organizations are transparent and open with employees about the financial health, strategy, and agenda of the organization.

3. Dialogue + Listening
Instead of the top-down monologue or dysfunctional silence that characterizes most workplaces, democratic organizations are committed to having
conversations that bring out new levels of meaning and connection.

4. Fairness + Dignity
Democratic organizations are committed to fairness and dignity, not treating some people like “somebodies” and other people like “nobodies.”

5. Accountability
Democratic organizations point fingers, not in a blaming way but in a liberating way. They are crystal clear about who is accountable to whom and for what.

6. Individual + Collective
In democratic organizations, the individual is just as important as the whole, meaning employees are valued for their individual contribution as well as for what they do to help achieve the collective goals of the organization.

7. Choice
Democratic organizations thrive on giving employees meaningful choices.

8. Integrity
Integrity is the name of the game, and democratic companies have a lot of it. They understand that freedom takes discipline and also doing what is morally and ethically right.

9. Decentralization
Democratic organizations make sure power is appropriately shared and distributed among people throughout the organization.

10. Reflection + Evaluation
Democratic organizations are committed to continuous feedback and development and are willing to learn from the past and apply lessons to improve the future.

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Mocca Perks, MediaCorp’s Groupon competitor, bites the dust

Bet you didn’t know that MediaCorp, Singapore’s largest broadcaster, had a daily deals site of their own. Well, we just found out about it today, and it is shutting down.

It’s called Mocca Perks, and it offers anything from beauty treatment to digital cameras. SGE was notified about their impending shut-down by a friend over at BoxinBlue.com, who received a message from them via email.

The same notification has gone up on their website, stating that the site is closed “to make way for a new e-commerce initiative”. We don’t know what the new venture is yet.

All unredeemed vouchers must be claimed by 2nd September 2012.

It’s somewhat surprising that their daily deals offering has gone nowhere, despite the financial muscle they have. Their Mocca Perks ads have been seen on Today newspaper, Singapore’s largest daily, with a circulation of around 677,000.

Which goes to show that simply throwing money and marketing into a new venture isn’t going to bring much returns if execution isn’t well done.

The closure of their daily deals offering follows about a month after the shutdown of the Mocca main site, which is their attempt at online classifieds.

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Mogujie: China’s Biggest Pinterest Clone is a Social Commerce Money Machine

The founder of China’s most popular Pinterest-like startup, Mogujie, has penned a blog post explaining his perceived formula for social media success on the web. Before hearing his idea, it’s worth noting that it sure is working out for Chen Qi (pictured below) himself, whose Mogujie site was revealed to be earning over 100,000 RMB ($15,900) per day in ad referral clicks to Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce site.

Mogujie.com, according to its own stats, has quickly grown to have 9.5 million registered users by the end of last month, of whom 2.2 million are active daily visitors who browse about 750,000 items on Taobao every day, and end up buying 60,000 of those. Yes, 60,000 actual online orders each day from its users. That’s some serious social commerce right there.

The social pinboard site focuses on female users, with frontpage categories for women’s clothing, shoes, handbags, home furnishings, and the like. A great deal of all the pinned items head to Alibaba’s C2C e-commerce portal.

So what is Chen Qi’s formula for success at this point in time, in the age of Pinterest and Instagram? In his post on Zhihu, which is like a Chinese iteration of Quora, Mr. Chen explains that since mid-2011 he has concocted “a very simple model of judgment” to determine the potential success of a new web product. “This model,” he says, “is composed of three characteristics” and are encapsulated in the abbreviation FOR, which means: Fragments, Organize, Re-organize. He explains:

The main content is the product, and it’s inevitably fragmented, and the debris is isomorphic. Like Twitter, where the whole thing is composed of 140 characters, or Sina Weibo where it’s 140 characters plus a photo, or Pinterest’s fragments of ‘beautiful artifacts’ photos plus a short description plus a URL. And on Mogujie it’s a case of ‘items for a beautiful woman’ plus a photo and a description plus an e-commerce destination.

And that’s just the first of three parts. Thereafter, Chen Qi expounds how the organisation of all those fragments needs a kind of organisation that allows trends to emerge and for it all to be easily browsed. Then comes the more interactive element of reorganization whereby users can play with all those neatly bundled elements in the form of retweeting, repinning, ‘liking’ and all the rest. That all comes together to make ‘FOR’ in his view. Of course, it’s just an evolution of what was happening earlier on the web – like with BBS, which are still quite popular in China. But those boards lack that final aspect of the formula: “BBSes don’t allow users to organize information (posts)” and so are inherently limited.

The Mogujie founder then ends his post by rating Twitter, Sina Weibo, Pinterest, and his own creation by his own FOR formula. He rates Twitter as F: 4.5, O: 4, R: 3, indicating it lacks a good mode of reorganization. Sina Weibo fares slightly better with F: 5, O: 4, R: 3.5. We’d certainly agree that Weibo makes reorganization of content by users much easier, having a better implementation of retweeting as well as the option of using comments. Chen modestly gives his own site lower scores than he assigns to Pinterest, admitting that his startup has issues that he’s “making efforts to resolve.”

Mogujie, despite working with Alibaba on its eTao Discover site, is already facing stronger competition, even from its own partner. Just last week, Taobao launched its own Pinterest clone, which will help keep a whole bunch of ad referral clicks in-house. Also, other Chinese web companies are weighing in with their own social commerce-minded ventures, such as Renren’s (NYSE:RENN) Plaza pinboard site.

[Sources: Chen Qi’s post on Zhihu; and Donews - both articles in Chinese]

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Tickled Media is Singapore’s first WorldBlu certified company for democratic practices

Tickled Media, which was recently announced as one of the top startups to watch this year, was recently just named among the World’s most democratic companies to work in by WorldBlu.

Tickled Media, a Singapore-based digital publishing house that operates LiveJournal, theAsianparent.com and Kidlander.com in several Asian markets, was recently selected as the first Singaporean operated company to be certified by WorldBlu, a company specialising in organisational democracy, as a globally recognized democratic workplace. The company, which is supported by Tigris Capital Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based media investment fund, also handles innovative online campaigns for both local and multi-national companies in the region

What are the selection process? Companies become eligible for a spot on the WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces™ only after its employees complete an assessment evaluating their organisations practice of the WorldBlu 10 Principles of Organisational Democracy™, with an overall combined score of 3.5/5 or higher. The assessment was developed based on a decade of research into what makes a world-class democratic company. Only organisations from the for-profit and non-profit sectors that have been in operation for at least one full year and have five or more employees can apply for WorldBlu certification.

Since they helped transition their company into being a democratic workplace a year ago, Tickled Media has seen an impressive revenue spike of 800 percent. CEO, Roshni Mahtani, explains, “Tickled Media’s democratic practices have made its employees happier. They want to come to work and they take ownership for what they do.”

So what makes Tickled Media stands out from other companies who are shortlisted? Well in Tickled Media, a team “lunch and share” session is held every Friday where one employee gets a chance to share their thoughts on their choice topic and the rest listen, relax, and enjoy good food. The company also goes on yearly holiday destination retreats to enhance the company’s sense of unity and provide an opportunity for anyone to voice their opinions or suggest improvements. Definitely sounds like a fun place to work in!

Photo: Livejournal Facebook Page

Other than Tickled media, 47 other for-profit and non-profit organizations from across the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Malaysia, Haiti, India, New Zealand, and South Africa also made it to the 2012 WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces™ . These companies comes from a diverse range of industries including, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, services and energy, and ranged in size from five to 90,000 employees, representing over $17 billion in combined annual revenue.

Some of the companies that have made it to the WorldBlu list of Most Democratic Workplaces 2012 include
1. AIESEC International – Rotterdam, Netherlands
2. Beyond Borders – Washington DC
3. DaVita – Denver, CO
4. Glassdoor – Sausalito, CA
5. Great Harvest Bread Company – Dillon, MT
6. HCL Technologies – Noida, India
7. MindValley – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
8. New Belgium Brewing Company – Fort Collins, CO
9. STATSIT – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
10. Tickled Media – Singapore, Singapore
11. WD-40 Company – San Diego, CA
12. Zappos.com – Las Vegas, NV

If you want to wiew the full WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces™ 2012 and read more unique best practices from this year’s list, you can do so at http://worldblu.com/awardee-profiles/2012.php.

Roshni also spoke at our recent Phillipines Satellite for Echelon 2012.

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Tickled Media is Singapore’s first WorldBlu certified company for democratic practices

Tickled Media, which was recently announced as one of the top startups to watch this year, was recently just named among the World’s most democratic companies to work in by WorldBlu.

Tickled Media, a Singapore-based digital publishing house that operates LiveJournal, theAsianparent.com and Kidlander.com in several Asian markets, was recently selected as the first Singaporean operated company to be certified by WorldBlu, a company specialising in organisational democracy, as a globally recognized democratic workplace. The company, which is supported by Tigris Capital Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based media investment fund, also handles innovative online campaigns for both local and multi-national companies in the region

What are the selection process? Companies become eligible for a spot on the WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces™ only after its employees complete an assessment evaluating their organisations practice of the WorldBlu 10 Principles of Organisational Democracy™, with an overall combined score of 3.5/5 or higher. The assessment was developed based on a decade of research into what makes a world-class democratic company. Only organisations from the for-profit and non-profit sectors that have been in operation for at least one full year and have five or more employees can apply for WorldBlu certification.

Since they helped transition their company into being a democratic workplace a year ago, Tickled Media has seen an impressive revenue spike of 800 percent. CEO, Roshni Mahtani, explains, “Tickled Media’s democratic practices have made its employees happier. They want to come to work and they take ownership for what they do.”

So what makes Tickled Media stands out from other companies who are shortlisted? Well in Tickled Media, a team “lunch and share” session is held every Friday where one employee gets a chance to share their thoughts on their choice topic and the rest listen, relax, and enjoy good food. The company also goes on yearly holiday destination retreats to enhance the company’s sense of unity and provide an opportunity for anyone to voice their opinions or suggest improvements. Definitely sounds like a fun place to work in!

Photo: Livejournal Facebook Page

Other than Tickled media, 47 other for-profit and non-profit organizations from across the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Malaysia, Haiti, India, New Zealand, and South Africa also made it to the 2012 WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces™ . These companies comes from a diverse range of industries including, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, services and energy, and ranged in size from five to 90,000 employees, representing over $17 billion in combined annual revenue.

Some of the companies that have made it to the WorldBlu list of Most Democratic Workplaces 2012 include
1. AIESEC International – Rotterdam, Netherlands
2. Beyond Borders – Washington DC
3. DaVita – Denver, CO
4. Glassdoor – Sausalito, CA
5. Great Harvest Bread Company – Dillon, MT
6. HCL Technologies – Noida, India
7. MindValley – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
8. New Belgium Brewing Company – Fort Collins, CO
9. STATSIT – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
10. Tickled Media – Singapore, Singapore
11. WD-40 Company – San Diego, CA
12. Zappos.com – Las Vegas, NV

If you want to wiew the full WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces™ 2012 and read more unique best practices from this year’s list, you can do so at http://worldblu.com/awardee-profiles/2012.php.

Roshni also spoke at our recent Phillipines Satellite for Echelon 2012.

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