LG Announces it has Shipped 3 Million LTE Smartphones

Korean electronics manufacturer LG (066570:KS) is announcing today that its LTE smartphones have sold three million units, and hopes to expand to sell them in new markets as the year progresses. So far, its LTE handsets include the Optimus LTE (which sold one million in its first 100 days), the Optimus Vu, the Optimus LTE Tag, and the Optimus LTE II. Overall, the company’s handset market share around the world is down, so perhaps it makes sense to double down on smartphones, specifically LTE ones — in contrast to Nokia’s strategy.

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Opinioneated lets you find food reviews by trusted bloggers in Singapore

Opinioneated lets you find food reviews by trusted food bloggers in Singapore, all on one site.

When websites which relies on user generated contents such as review sites grow and scale up, one of the challenges often faced is the assurance of quality contents as well as signal-to-noise issue. That was how I feel about major food review sites such as the recently acquired Hungrygowhere, which I never used, simply because there were too much reviews which I do not trust. Apparently, I am not alone.

Yongfook of TinyTrunk, built and shipped Opinioneated, a website that aggregates food review by popular Singapore food bloggers, in just 20 hours over the weekend. Unlike Hungrygowhere, Opinioneated only takes in account of reviews by popular food bloggers, and this list currently curated by Yongfook himself, includes bloggers like Ladyironchef, Cooksnapeatlove, ieatishootipost and many more.

To me, Opinioneated definitely has an intuitive design and is almost dummy proof. When you arrive at the landing page, there will be categories of foods where you can choose from. Once you decide on which cuisine you want, the restaurants of that cuisine will show up on the map (powered by Bing), and you can then choose and read the reviews by the curated list of regular food bloggers. The website currently tracks over 400 restaurants with more than 700 food reviews.

The e27 team editorial team jokes internally that Yongfook has again “spoiled the market” by designing and building another elegant product.

Jon Yongfook, creator of Opinioneated

When reaching out to Yongfook about his weekend hack, he says: “In my opinion it’s incredibly important to satisfy your curiosity and inspiration with side-projects. A healthy entrepreneur should be full of ideas and have the will (and ability) to execute them, but also the maturity to then really knuckle down and focus on the one with the most potential. Some ideas will be small, some will be big – but an entrepreneur should understand how they all fit together. Side projects can be directly complementary to main projects (exploring another facet of an overall theme – for me that theme is “local”) or they can simply be used as an exercise to do something fun and learn some new skills. I consider both Tinytrunk and Opinioneated to be MVPs- I’m learning about what people want and where I can create value inthe local space, whether that’s shopping or eating or another activity.”

To the hackers, Yongfook shared in his blog post that “the site is built on Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Heroku, using AWS Cloudfront and S3 for static asset type stuff. Content was acquired via the Bing API and a little bit (ok a lot) of xpath kung fu.”

With the acquisition of Hungrygowhere earlier last week, and the recent launch of two beautiful social food sharing app, Burpple and Snapdi.sh, and now Opinioneated, the month of May is certainly filled with a lot of excitement in the food and beverage space.

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Opinioneated lets you find food reviews by trusted bloggers in Singapore

Opinioneated lets you find food reviews by trusted food bloggers in Singapore, all on one site.

When websites which relies on user generated contents such as review sites grow and scale up, one of the challenges often faced is the assurance of quality contents as well as signal-to-noise issue. That was how I feel about major food review sites such as the recently acquired Hungrygowhere, which I never used, simply because there were too much reviews which I do not trust. Apparently, I am not alone.

Yongfook of TinyTrunk, built and shipped Opinioneated, a website that aggregates food review by popular Singapore food bloggers, in just 20 hours over the weekend. Unlike Hungrygowhere, Opinioneated only takes in account of reviews by popular food bloggers, and this list currently curated by Yongfook himself, includes bloggers like Ladyironchef, Cooksnapeatlove, ieatishootipost and many more.

To me, Opinioneated definitely has an intuitive design and is almost dummy proof. When you arrive at the landing page, there will be categories of foods where you can choose from. Once you decide on which cuisine you want, the restaurants of that cuisine will show up on the map (powered by Bing), and you can then choose and read the reviews by the curated list of regular food bloggers. The website currently tracks over 400 restaurants with more than 700 food reviews.

The e27 team editorial team jokes internally that Yongfook has again “spoiled the market” by designing and building another elegant product.

Jon Yongfook, creator of Opinioneated

When reaching out to Yongfook about his weekend hack, he says: “In my opinion it’s incredibly important to satisfy your curiosity and inspiration with side-projects. A healthy entrepreneur should be full of ideas and have the will (and ability) to execute them, but also the maturity to then really knuckle down and focus on the one with the most potential. Some ideas will be small, some will be big – but an entrepreneur should understand how they all fit together. Side projects can be directly complementary to main projects (exploring another facet of an overall theme – for me that theme is “local”) or they can simply be used as an exercise to do something fun and learn some new skills. I consider both Tinytrunk and Opinioneated to be MVPs- I’m learning about what people want and where I can create value inthe local space, whether that’s shopping or eating or another activity.”

To the hackers, Yongfook shared in his blog post that “the site is built on Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Heroku, using AWS Cloudfront and S3 for static asset type stuff. Content was acquired via the Bing API and a little bit (ok a lot) of xpath kung fu.”

With the acquisition of Hungrygowhere earlier last week, and the recent launch of two beautiful social food sharing app, Burpple and Snapdi.sh, and now Opinioneated, the month of May is certainly filled with a lot of excitement in the food and beverage space.

Link to full article

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Opinioneated

Opinioneated lets you find food reviews by trusted food bloggers in Singapore, all on one site.

When websites which relies on user generated contents such as review sites grow and scale up, one of the challenges often faced is the assurance of quality contents as well as signal-to-noise issue. That was how I feel about major food review sites such as the recently acquired Hungrygowhere, which I never used, simply because there were too much reviews which I do not trust. Apparently, I am not alone.

Yongfook of TinyTrunk, built and shipped Opinioneated, a website that aggregates food review by popular Singapore food bloggers, in just 20 hours over the weekend. Unlike Hungrygowhere, Opinioneated only takes in account of reviews by popular food bloggers, and this list currently curated by Yongfook himself, includes bloggers like Ladyironchef, Cooksnapeatlove, ieatishootipost and many more.

To me, Opinioneated definitely has an intuitive design and is almost dummy proof. When you arrive at the landing page, there will be categories of foods where you can choose from. Once you decide on which cuisine you want, the restaurants of that cuisine will show up on the map (powered by Bing), and you can then choose and read the reviews by the curated list of regular food bloggers. The website currently tracks over 400 restaurants with more than 700 food reviews.

The e27 team editorial team jokes internally that Yongfook has again “spoiled the market” by designing and building another elegant product.

Jon Yongfook, creator of Opinioneated

When reaching out to Yongfook about his weekend hack, he says: “In my opinion it’s incredibly important to satisfy your curiosity and inspiration with side-projects. A healthy entrepreneur should be full of ideas and have the will (and ability) to execute them, but also the maturity to then really knuckle down and focus on the one with the most potential. Some ideas will be small, some will be big – but an entrepreneur should understand how they all fit together. Side projects can be directly complementary to main projects (exploring another facet of an overall theme – for me that theme is “local”) or they can simply be used as an exercise to do something fun and learn some new skills. I consider both Tinytrunk and Opinioneated to be MVPs- I’m learning about what people want and where I can create value inthe local space, whether that’s shopping or eating or another activity.”

To the hackers, Yongfook shared in his blog post that “the site is built on Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Heroku, using AWS Cloudfront and S3 for static asset type stuff. Content was acquired via the Bing API and a little bit (ok a lot) of xpath kung fu.”

With the acquisition of Hungrygowhere earlier last week, and the recent launch of two beautiful social food sharing app, Burpple and Snapdi.sh, and now Opinioneated, the month of May is certainly filled with a lot of excitement in the food and beverage space.

Link to full article

Read More

Opinioneated

Opinioneated lets you find food reviews by trusted food bloggers in Singapore, all on one site.

When websites which relies on user generated contents such as review sites grow and scale up, one of the challenges often faced is the assurance of quality contents as well as signal-to-noise issue. That was how I feel about major food review sites such as the recently acquired Hungrygowhere, which I never used, simply because there were too much reviews which I do not trust. Apparently, I am not alone.

Yongfook of TinyTrunk, built and shipped Opinioneated, a website that aggregates food review by popular Singapore food bloggers, in just 20 hours over the weekend. Unlike Hungrygowhere, Opinioneated only takes in account of reviews by popular food bloggers, and this list currently curated by Yongfook himself, includes bloggers like Ladyironchef, Cooksnapeatlove, ieatishootipost and many more.

To me, Opinioneated definitely has an intuitive design and is almost dummy proof. When you arrive at the landing page, there will be categories of foods where you can choose from. Once you decide on which cuisine you want, the restaurants of that cuisine will show up on the map (powered by Bing), and you can then choose and read the reviews by the curated list of regular food bloggers. The website currently tracks over 400 restaurants with more than 700 food reviews.

The e27 team editorial team jokes internally that Yongfook has again “spoiled the market” by designing and building another elegant product.

Jon Yongfook, creator of Opinioneated

When reaching out to Yongfook about his weekend hack, he says: “In my opinion it’s incredibly important to satisfy your curiosity and inspiration with side-projects. A healthy entrepreneur should be full of ideas and have the will (and ability) to execute them, but also the maturity to then really knuckle down and focus on the one with the most potential. Some ideas will be small, some will be big – but an entrepreneur should understand how they all fit together. Side projects can be directly complementary to main projects (exploring another facet of an overall theme – for me that theme is “local”) or they can simply be used as an exercise to do something fun and learn some new skills. I consider both Tinytrunk and Opinioneated to be MVPs- I’m learning about what people want and where I can create value inthe local space, whether that’s shopping or eating or another activity.”

To the hackers, Yongfook shared in his blog post that “the site is built on Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Heroku, using AWS Cloudfront and S3 for static asset type stuff. Content was acquired via the Bing API and a little bit (ok a lot) of xpath kung fu.”

With the acquisition of Hungrygowhere earlier last week, and the recent launch of two beautiful social food sharing app, Burpple and Snapdi.sh, and now Opinioneated, the month of May is certainly filled with a lot of excitement in the food and beverage space.

Link to full article

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China’s B2C E-commerce Space is a Two Horse Race

Photo: hktaobao.net

A report earlier in the month from the folks over at Analysys International indicates that China’s B2C e-commerce market could be worth as much as 81.8 billion RMB (or $12.9 billion).

Looking at the Analysys’s breakdown of the companies who hold the biggest share of all that cash, Alibaba’s (HKG:1688) Tmall is way out front with 37.38 percent of the B2C online retail market. As great as Tmall’s dominance is, it’s actually down from its even more dominant Q4 position, when it held 39.9 percent share.

On the other hand, the other major play in this space, 360Buy, has risen to 17.23 percent from 14.7 percent in the previous quarter.

It should be noted that the global e-commerce behemoth Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is only clutching just over two percent of the market in China, down with a number of other also-rans. But a few months back Amazon China’s CEO Wang Hanhua noted that he figures this sector to be more of a marathon than a sprint. Nevertheless, it certainly looks to be a two-horse race right now between Tmall and 360Buy [1].

[Download image version of this chart]

[Via Technode [2]]

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1. Wait a minute… Horses don’t run marathons. I need new metaphors!  ↩

2. Technode has the market size as 81 million, although the original report says 818 亿, or 818 x 100 million, or 81.8 billion. Big Chinese numbers are, admittedly, very confusing.  ↩

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Airtel forays into mobile advertising business

Couple of years back, Airtel in partnership with Nokia was planning to launch an ad-network. Though the project never took-off, airtel has now announced the launch of its mobile advertising (m-Advertising) solution in India, in order to bring advertisers to connect with airtel customers across all the platforms (WAP, messaging service, digital TV etc).

Through Airtel’s m-Advertising platform, advertisers will be able to leverage multiple communications outlets and tools such as mobile internet (WAP), Messaging services and Airtel digital TV to engage their audiences. Airtel also enjoys the capability to deliver massive reach in a high impact burst which can be delivered in just a few hours using touch points such as end of call notifications, recharge notifications & Digital TV guides.

“ With the mobile advertising market poised to grow by more than 40% over the next few years, Airtel with its technology, scale and customer intelligence is placed uniquely to leverage this growing medium. Airtel’s m-advertising platform will enable advertisers to land their message in a simple, effective manner in an increasingly complex media environment.” [K Srinivas, President – Consumer Business, Bharti Airtel].

It will not only create opportunities for increasing brand saliency but also conversions using technologies such as mobile couponing for segments such as youth, upper SEC, smartphone users etc. With this platform, companies can also extend their access to the rural audience with voice solutions.”

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Twitter Developer Teatimes in Southeast Asia – Singapore and Manila

Social media giant Twitter has been hosting sessions to meet the many developers building applications on its platform.

Developer Teatimes allows the Twitter team to share the latest developments with the Twitter platform, areas of demand within the ecosystem that they’re seeing, and technical dives into integration opportunities for developers. They will also be holding a Q&A session with members of the platform team, plus time to hang out with each other.

Members from the Twitter developer relations team will be calling in remotely over Skype for audience Q&A as well.

First held in London, then New York. Developer Teatimes have now been held across the continents in Toronto, Buenos Aires, Nairobi and now in this part of the world. In Southeast Asia, there are two upcoming sessions, one in Singapore and the other in Manila.

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Event Details

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In Singapore:

When: Tuesday June 5th 2012
Time: 10am to 12pm SGT
Where: PlugIn@Blk71, 71 Ayer Rajah Crescent #02-18 Singapore 139951

Register for the Singapore session here.

In Manila, Philippines:

When: Thursday June 7th 2012
Time: 9am to 12pm PHT
Where: 5/F Orient Square Bldg, F. Ortigas Jr. Road, Ortigas Center, Pasig City, NCR

Register for the Manila session here.

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Security Researcher Finds Backdoor in China-Manufactured Chips

Lawmakers in the United States have been concerned about the security of hardware manufactured in China for years now, especially since many chips and other pieces of computer equipment manufactured in China are used for sensitive military and civil applications that would make them quite dangerous in the wrong hands if they were compromised. Among other things, this has manifested in a lot of suspicion stateside about Huawei and other Chinese companies in the telecomunnications industry expanding their businesses into China.

Today, news spread on Twitter that Sergei Skorobogatov, a security researcher, has found a backdoor in a Chinese-manufactured “American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard.” From his website:

We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.

So yeah, that sounds pretty bad. And although the chip isn’t manufactured by Huawei, this could be the death-knell for its plans abroad — especially in the US — as this would seem to confirm suspicions that Chinese manufacturers are (knowingly or unknowingly) cooperating with the government to insert backdoor systems into foreign military hardware.

Now, grain of salt time: this doesn’t seem to have been confirmed by anyone else, and it’s difficult to confirm exactly how the backdoor was inserted in the first place, which means we don’t really know who is behind it. Moreover, Skorobogatov is not an entirely unbiased source, since it appears he is planning to sell the scanning technology used to uncover this backdoor.

In the end, if the story gets enough momentum, whether it’s true and who is behind it may not matter. Suspicions about Chinese hardware are already quite widespread; the revelation that Chinese chips with exploitable backdoor security flaws are installed in our military (and nuclear) equipment is not likely to make American legislators any more excited about welcoming Huawei (or other Chinese tech companies) into the US.

[via @pdenlinger and @niubi, image source]

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Malaysian company debuts first local tablet, 1Malaysia Pad. Yay or nay?

Malaysian company, MalTech Pro, debuts their own Android powered tablet.

Couple of days ago, there was an announcement which caught our attention: Malaysia is debutting its very own tablet called 1Malaysia Pad. Developed by MalTechPro Sdn Bhd, the tablet is the first Malaysian made tablet, and will join the array of tablet products in competing for a piece of the Malaysian market, which was reported earlier this month as the largest tablet market in Southeast Asia. The tablet is priced at an introductory price of RM999 (US$ 320), which is RM200(US$65) cheaper than Apple’s iPad 2 and RM150 (US$48) cheaper than Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Differentiating factor for 1Malaysia Pad

To compete with the other tablets out there, MalTechPro differentiates itself by being able to customize and build apps for corporate clients who are interested in bulk buying the 1Malaysia Pad. “Let’s say a company wants 500 units. We can customise the apps to do whatever they need, and these apps will be exclusive to that particular company,” Datuk Sohaimi Shahadan, MalTechPro Executive Chairman, also the exco of the UMNO Youth, said during the product’s soft launch.

Responses from Malaysia’s tech forum: Lowyat on 1Malaysia Pad’s specs

The 7 inch 1Malaysia Pad which runs on Android Gingerbread Operating system, comes with two cameras – 3.0 megapixel device at the back and a 0.3 megapixel in the front. Other specs include WiFi and 3G data capabilities, a Li-Polymer 4000mAH battery and a 32GB micro SD memory card. There has been quite a number of discussion on Malaysia’s main gadget forum, Lowyat.net on whether the 1Malaysia pad will be usable, and taking a look at the Android Gingerbread build, which is Android’s version 2.3 (latest build = 4.04), the 1Malaysia Pad seemed somewhat unconvincing to tech savvy Malaysians in Malaysia. Most of the forum users seemed to agreed on this, which saw comments such as “boleh untuk baling anjing” (loosely translate as, “can be used to throw at dogs.”) on the forum. Many of the users on Lowyat too commented that the unimpressive tablet bears much similarity to tablets sold in China.

Photo: 1Malaysia Pad vs NextBook

What does local developer has to say

When reached out to local developer on his comments of the 1Malaysia Pad, Felix Leong, who help runs WebCamp KL questions the motivation and logic behind the 1Malaysia Pad. Assuming the tablet is launched with government financial backing (considering the background of the executive chairman and the usage of the 1Malaysia tagline), the question of what problem are they trying to solve with the launch of 1Malaysia Pad comes to Felix’s mind.

“I seriously doubt a cheap tablet is going to help to boost IT literacy among Malaysians, especially the rural poor. After all, being priced at RM999 (66% of the first generation Samsung Galaxy Tab if my memory serve me right), the rural poor must be able afford it together with a bundle broadband package to reap the complete benefits. But wait, isn’t the 1Malaysia Pad supposed to be a private business venture? As a private business venture, I’d probably say “nice try, good luck”. But if my assumption that it’s meant to be a national initiative (read: government) towards something, I really can’t understand what’s the logic and big goal that they are trying to achieve other than just happily slapping the 1Malaysia slogan on everything they can see.”

If its objective is to increase the literacy or helping students, the steep price might be counter effective. Thailand, Malaysia’s neighbouring country, seemed to be able to do a better job as it recently launched what is called the world largest educational tablet distribution to its first graders in hopes to trigger an education revolution. The seven inch tablet too comes at a cheaper price USD$81 (RM251) at a higher specs (Android Icecream Sandwich 1GB of RAM together with 8GB of storage and the feature of GPS), which makes one wonder, how is Thailand able to provide its educational tablet at such a low price point while 1Malaysia Pad could not do so?

1Malaysia Pad vs NextBook offered as a group buying deal

Digging a bit deeper, we also stumbled upon a recent tablet deal offered by Groupsmore (Groupon Malaysia), concluded on October 2011. The deal saw DinoDirect offering its Nextbook premium 7Android Tablet for RM499 instead of RM1260. The 7 inch Nextbook which also runs on Gingerbread 2.3, has quite a similar specs with the 1Malaysia pad. The similarities between the NextBook and the 1Malaysia Pad in terms of hardware specifications indicates that the 1Malaysia Pad may have a large profit margin, which defeats the purpose of appealing to the lower income group in Malaysia.

Photo: Groupsmore's NextBook deal

New players in the 7 inch tablet market

Finally, as Google and Asus is rumored to be jointly releasing its new 7 inch tablet to the market this coming June, which comes pre-loaded with the next version of Android, perhaps it would be more convincing for 1Malaysia Pad to launch an equivalent version of an Android tablet device, rather than a scaled down version of it. Apple too is also rumored to be be debutting its own 7 inch iPad at USD$200 – USD$250 in October 2012.

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