An Entrepreneur’s Promise to his Mother

[Editorial notes: Guest article contributed by Sahil Baghla of Bluegape.com. Sahil is a recent passout of IIT Kanpur.]

I still remember your confused face when I first told you that I want to start my own company instead of sitting for the campus placements. I can understand your feelings as most of the relatives were asking me about the package I would be getting after graduation since I have been in second year.  I can never be thankful enough for giving me the energy to do what I really wanted to do.

On this mother’s day, I want to make you few promises :

1) I might not be earning big cheques as some of the CS guys of my college would be but I am really enjoying what I am doing and am fine with whatever I am earning. But If I ever go short of money to date my rockstar girl, I won’t hesitate to ask you for some.

2) Sometimes I might not be able to call you for days but that would never mean I don’t remember or miss you. It’s just that things are getting tough for me and I am not in a position to share with you everything because I am afraid of making you sad. But believe me, you gave birth to a very strong kid to handle them all.

3) The road is uncertain, it may happen that I will make tons of mistakes. Reinforce my faith, if that happens because its you who taught me not to fear of mistakes while chasing a dream. I can’t promise you success but I can promise you my hardwork, and I promise that I will leave no stone unturned to make you feel proud of being a mom of an entrepreneur.

4) It might happen that I will fail and get back to the point where I started. At that moment, I just want you to be there to congratulate me for my experience. Believe me, it won’t be end of the world. Just give me some more power to start a fresh journey with much more energy and encourage me to make a dent in the universe. I promise I won’t give up no matter how tough things get.

Recommended Read: A Letter from an Entrepreneur to his Mother

[Republished from Sahil’s blog post.]

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GMIC Panel Discusses Mobile Health

Health is the easiest thing in the world to take for granted until you don’t have it. But how can mobile technology help solve health issues and make life easier for patients and doctors alike? This afternoon, Marcus Sigurdsson of McCann Health moderated a discussion with David Almstrom (managing director, Symbio), Liu Qingyu (founder, Joint Asia Public Health Initiative), and Cheuk Lee (general manager, Complete Medical Group) on mHealth, which is apparently the term cool people use to talk about mobile health apps and uses.

Before the panel began, Sigurdsson gave a short presentation and pointed out that it’s not all about helping people directly; health costs are also a significant burden on the global economy, and solving or streamlining health issues with mobile technology can save a lot of money. For example, Sigurdsson said that if the burden non-communicable diseases place on the economy could be eliminated, that could result in a GDP boost of 4-10 percent in developing countries like India.

The panelists all agreed that mobile apps can help people in a lot of different ways. Mobile apps can help doctors with everything from data entry to diagnosis, and they can also help patients manage their health, from counting calories to managing complex medication schedules.

David Alstrom pointed out that the proliferation of mobile phones alone has been a boon to the health industry. Apps aside, with more than 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide, even simple technologies like SMS can help governments deal with health problems. In South Africa, for example, Alstrom said the government dealt with a tuberculosis outbreak by using SMS messages to remind patients to take their medicine at the right time, which resulted in 99.3 percent of patients properly taking their medicine. This program cost only $16 per patient per year, which might seem a little expensive, but Alstrom pointed out that if more patients had failed to properly take their medication — which likely would have happened without the SMS reminders — the costs of continuing to treat those patients would be much higher.

Liu Qingyu was the first to point out a problem with mobile health that affects China with specific intensity, but also troubles the rest of the world: an overabundance of choice. Liu pointed out that searching Baidu (for example) for a health condition returns thousands of results, which often differ and can even be contradictory of just plain wrong. Liu argued, though, that mobile technology could serve to aid in the propogation of correct information, especially in the case of a crisis.

Alstrom and Cheuk agreed this would likely be a problem in the years to come. Cheuk bemoaned the “duplication of effort” and suggested he hoped a method could be found to unify many of the applications that do the same thing. Alstrom also pointed out that a lack of standards in hospitals can make it difficult to develop mobile apps that are universally applicable because different hospitals do things differently. “I’m not a big fan of standardizing everything,” he said, but the lack of standardization certainly makes everything more complicated.

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Using peer-to-peer home rental services in Singapore? You just might be breaking the rules

Short term room rental websites continues expansion plans and will stick to the strict rule on house subletting in Asia.

When discussing about disruptive innovation in the travel industry, one company comes to mind: AirBnB. The idea is amazingly simple, and turned the company into a multi-million dollar company. AirBnB allows you to rent out your house to paying guest for a few days, earning you extra income. AirBnB is growing so fast, and is looking to expand into Asia, according to Web In Travel, AirBnB is planning to open an office in Singapore and is reportedly recruiting a managing director for Southeast Asia.

Of course, there are existing players in Singapore as well as in Asia, and the space is getting more and more competitive. With similar companies like Roomorama and 9Flats fighting for the limited amount of listings in the region, Straits Times recently posted an article saying that these short term stay website might be breaking the law. How so? According to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the authority governing real estate in Singapore, private residential properties can be rented out or sublet – but only for periods of six months or more.

We reached out to both Roomorama and 9Flats to clarify this issue. According to Ng Wei Leen, Head of 9Flats Operations in Asia, he says: “While I cannot comment on our operational procedures, I can state with confidence that we take the law very seriously in the cities where we operate. Our hosts are the core of our service, and if we don’t protect them, we will fail.With that in mind, I’m proud to say we’ve kicked off our efforts to educate hosts on this matter. Here is a link to our blog post that seeks to clarify the situation in some of the biggest cities where we are active.  I believe that at this time, we have proved that we do more than any other competitor out there to protect our users.We have the only property insurance program in town, and we are the only one with an effort to educate hosts on legal issues.”

On the illegal guest hosting, Federico Folcia, CEO of Roomorama, replied saying: “homeowners and providers must accept our terms and conditions which state very clearly that in order to rent on a short term basis you must abide by local laws. Roomorama is a free marketplace, and we cannot police every single listing on our site. However, if we are notified of properties that are in violation of any law, we will investigate and remove the listing if necessary.” Federico too says that the strict rule in Singapore will not affect its expansion plans as they abide by the law and they work mostly with professional property managers and companies to handle their operations.

If you are thinking of letting out your house and host any guests, do make sure that you abide by the law. Yeoh Siew Hoon, editor and producer at Web In Travel, Federico, CEO of Roomorama, and Weston Hankins, CTO of 9Flats, will also be speaking at our Echelon event come June 11 and 12.

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Using peer-to-peer home rental services in Singapore? You just might be breaking the rules

Short term room rental websites continues expansion plans and will stick to the strict rule on house subletting in Asia.

When discussing about disruptive innovation in the travel industry, one company comes to mind: AirBnB. The idea is amazingly simple, and turned the company into a multi-million dollar company. AirBnB allows you to rent out your house to paying guest for a few days, earning you extra income. AirBnB is growing so fast, and is looking to expand into Asia, according to Web In Travel, AirBnB is planning to open an office in Singapore and is reportedly recruiting a managing director for Southeast Asia.

Of course, there are existing players in Singapore as well as in Asia, and the space is getting more and more competitive. With similar companies like Roomorama and 9Flats fighting for the limited amount of listings in the region, Straits Times recently posted an article saying that these short term stay website might be breaking the law. How so? According to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the authority governing real estate in Singapore, private residential properties can be rented out or sublet – but only for periods of six months or more.

We reached out to both Roomorama and 9Flats to clarify this issue. According to Ng Wei Leen, Head of 9Flats Operations in Asia, he says: “While I cannot comment on our operational procedures, I can state with confidence that we take the law very seriously in the cities where we operate. Our hosts are the core of our service, and if we don’t protect them, we will fail.With that in mind, I’m proud to say we’ve kicked off our efforts to educate hosts on this matter. Here is a link to our blog post that seeks to clarify the situation in some of the biggest cities where we are active.  I believe that at this time, we have proved that we do more than any other competitor out there to protect our users.We have the only property insurance program in town, and we are the only one with an effort to educate hosts on legal issues.”

On the illegal guest hosting, Federico Folcia, CEO of Roomorama, replied saying: “homeowners and providers must accept our terms and conditions which state very clearly that in order to rent on a short term basis you must abide by local laws. Roomorama is a free marketplace, and we cannot police every single listing on our site. However, if we are notified of properties that are in violation of any law, we will investigate and remove the listing if necessary.” Federico too says that the strict rule in Singapore will not affect its expansion plans as they abide by the law and they work mostly with professional property managers and companies to handle their operations.

If you are thinking of letting out your house and host any guests, do make sure that you abide by the law. Yeoh Siew Hoon, editor and producer at Web In Travel, Federico, CEO of Roomorama, and Weston Hankins, CTO of 9Flats, will also be speaking at our Echelon event come June 11 and 12.

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Tapjoy Asia Fund Provides $5 Million For App Developers in Asia

Mobile ad and publishing platform Tapjoy has announced what it’s calling the Tapjoy Asia Fund. This will be a $5 million fund that aims to support developers in Asia to fuel growth of Free-to-Play mobile apps for the Android and iOS platforms. So this new Tapjoy Asia fund provides both money and support for developers. Here are some more details of what that entails:

• Working capital to get started
• User acquisition through Tapjoy
• Monetization through Tapjoy’s Mobile Value Exchange platform
• Free-to-Play Gaming and Virtual Economy expertise
• Consulting and optimization of all user acquisition campaigns
• Real-time reporting

How can developers tap into this fund? You can log on and apply at the Tapjoy Asia Fund site or send an email to the Tapjoy team here.

In Asia, Tapjoy has offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul. The Tapjoy platform spans 20,000 mobile applications and reachers over 600 million mobile consumers worldwide.

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Yebhi acquires Jewellery Portal, StylishYou [AcquaHire]

Ecommerce portal, Yebhi has acquired StylishYou.in, a fashion jewellery e-tail company. Post this acquisition, StylishYou founder Shraddha Danani will head the jewellery category vertical at Yebhi. The cash and equity deal also entails the acquisition of StylishYou’s merchandizing team.

“Jewellery e-retailing as a category is very nascent right now and we would like to streamline our efforts to make it the next big thing! Yebhi.com, with its large logistics and delivery network, can provide Stylishyou within Yebhi the deepest reach. We at Yebhi make constant efforts to improvise on the basis of people’s feedback and now the demand is highest for jewellery. Thus, we will ensure that along with lifestyle, Yebhi will also be India’s largest online jewellery store.” [Manmohan Agarwal, CEO, Yebhi/source]

At the time of writing this article, StylishYou site was down and a quick look at Alexa traffic suggests that this is more of an acqua-hire (StylishYou doesn’t seem to have a significant site traffic/last tweet was sent on Nov 3rd).

Yebhi (earlier known as BigShoeBazaaar) raised INR 40 Crores from Catmaran Fund and Nexus Venture Partners earlier.

Online Jewellery Business Opportunity in India

As per eBay’s 2011 census guide, a jewellery item is sold every 4 minutes and late 2011, Accel invested $5mn in BlueStone, online jewellery store.

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Aside, Flipkart is launching its Apparel section very soon.

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CuriousCore no longer in secret development with CuriousCatch expecting beta sale next month

CuriousCore comes out of stealth mode with their new product CuriousCatch, with their beta sale happening next month.

If you have been following Angel’s Gate, a local reality TV show on entrepreneurship featuring startups, you would have come across Daylon Soh, Co-founder of CuriousCore.

For the past few months, the team has been working on their new product, CuriousCatch that is set to launch in a few months’ time. Here’s a preview of what the product is as explained by Daylon:

“CuriousCatch.com aims to be the simplest online store for trendsetters to discover everyday designs in Asia. As a Home Shopping Channel for Design, we delight through fanatical customer support and cool video content for the products we sell.”

Photo: Curious Core

For the past few months, Daylon has been travelling around, meeting and learning from people. Having been gone through and graduated from the Founder Institute program, he has gained confidence to start his own company and lead it towards a new direction that is operationally sound, market-validated and scalable early this year.

As observed by Daylon, the number of IKEA and MUJI stores growing worldwide has been a good indicator to gauge the demand of affordable design in each city. This growth coupled with the recent expansion of its main competitor, Fab.com to Germany, Daylon is sure that there is a big opportunity for growth.

Daylon has always been a keen user of well-designed products. This has helped him to connect with some of the local brands and designers such as FABRIX, Sumajin and Uyii.

CuriousCatch will be running its beta sale in a month’s time. So if you would like to the first few to shop creative and unique designer items, sign up here. $5 credits will be given away for early signups and a 10% discount coupon will be given away for every 2 friends you refer.

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CuriousCore no longer in secret development with CuriousCatch expecting beta sale next month

CuriousCore comes out of stealth mode with their new product CuriousCatch, with their beta sale happening next month.

If you have been following Angel’s Gate, a local reality TV show on entrepreneurship featuring startups, you would have come across Daylon Soh, Co-founder of CuriousCore.

For the past few months, the team has been working on their new product, CuriousCatch that is set to launch in a few months’ time. Here’s a preview of what the product is as explained by Daylon:

“CuriousCatch.com aims to be the simplest online store for trendsetters to discover everyday designs in Asia. As a Home Shopping Channel for Design, we delight through fanatical customer support and cool video content for the products we sell.”

Photo: Curious Core

For the past few months, Daylon has been travelling around, meeting and learning from people. Having been gone through and graduated from the Founder Institute program, he has gained confidence to start his own company and lead it towards a new direction that is operationally sound, market-validated and scalable early this year.

As observed by Daylon, the number of IKEA and MUJI stores growing worldwide has been a good indicator to gauge the demand of affordable design in each city. This growth coupled with the recent expansion of its main competitor, Fab.com to Germany, Daylon is sure that there is a big opportunity for growth.

Daylon has always been a keen user of well-designed products. This has helped him to connect with some of the local brands and designers such as FABRIX, Sumajin and Uyii.

CuriousCatch will be running its beta sale in a month’s time. So if you would like to the first few to shop creative and unique designer items, sign up here. $5 credits will be given away for early signups and a 10% discount coupon will be given away for every 2 friends you refer.

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Sina Weibo’s User Contract is Not a Big Deal

There’s been an awful lot of hubbub about Sina Weibo’s planned introduction of a user contract. The terms will reportedly be implemented on May 28, and are being interpreted as another “crackdown” on weibo freedom of speech. Specifically, much of the discussion concerns article 13, which reads like this (translation via TheNextWeb):

Article 13) Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:
1. Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
2. Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
3. Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the honor or interests of the nation
4. Incites ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermines ethnic unity, or harms ethnic traditions and customs
5. Promotes evil teachings and superstitions
6. Spreads rumors, disrupts social order, and destroys societal stability
7. Promotes illicit activity, gambling, violence, or calls for the committing of crimes
8. Calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings, and assemblies
9. Has other content, which is forbidden by laws, administrative regulations, and national regulations

At face value, this certainly looks concerning, but it’s important to remember that this doesn’t actually change anything. Most of the language of this article comes directly from Chinese laws that are already in effect and already apply to Weibo users (just like they apply to everyone else in China). Even before the introduction of this code of conduct, weibo users have had their accounts closed — and in some cases have been held criminally liable — for violating these regulations. Sina putting them in writing looks repressive (and it is) but it’s worth remembering that Sina didn’t invent any of these conditions. They are pulled directly from Chinese law and are applicable to weibo posts regardless of whether Sina includes them in a user contract or not.

More concerning is the news that Sina will implement a points system and dock users who violate these principles. Users whose “credit” reaches zero will have their accounts canceled. That sucks, but again, let’s keep in mind that this was already happening; there are plenty of users who violated these rules over the past few years and found their accounts canceled (just ask Ai Weiwei) even though there was no points system in effect.

It’s not clear yet exactly how the points system will work, and it’s possible these restrictions will be used to close more accounts than would previously have been affected. But given how haphazardly Sina has implemented its real-name policies, I wouldn’t be surprised to find the points system has some gaping loopholes as well. It’s not in Sina’s interest to ban its own users, and the company will likely try to avoid doing that as much as it can. How successful it will be depends on the level of government intervention.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not a fan of the points system or the user contract. Transparency is nice, but transparency about something repressive isn’t as great, and I don’t think this is really about transparency as much as it is about Sina looking like it’s doing something. Either way, my point is just that in practice, it’s not clear how anything on weibo will actually change as a result of this new contract. Article 13 is a rehashing of Chinese laws that absolutely apply regardless of Sina policies, and Sina’s censors have already been shuttering accounts that spread “sensitive” content for some time. Putting out a user contract and points system, I suspect, is just adding visibility to a system that has been in place since weibo’s initial launch.

In other words: does a punch hurt more if you see the fist coming?

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