Rumor: Baidu in Talks to Acquire Makers of UC Browser

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a web company in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a mobile strategy. And so there’s a ring of plausibility to new rumors in the Chinese media today that Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s search engine giant, might be trying to acquire UCWeb, the Chinese makers of the globally popular UC Browser (pictured above), which has over 40 million users outside of the middle kingdom, and is the leading mobile browser within it.

Today ChinaZ says that Baidu is seeing a dominant 30 percent of all mobile traffic to its sites coming from various versions of the cross-platform UC Browser – but that figure could be even higher in practice. And so, to gain more control over that sizable user-ship, and perhaps to spare itself the efforts with Baidu’s own mobile browser, the search engine is reportedly in talks with UCWeb with a view to an acquisition. UCWeb – which has 200 million users of its browsers – might be worth as much as US$1 billion, which would make its buyout as large as Facebook’s snapping up of Instagram earlier this year.

UCWeb has the option to replicate Opera (OSE: OPERA), the Norwegian company behind the original cloud-boosted mobile browser, and go for a public listing when the time is right. But an exit via an acquisition is perhaps more likely. And though it would be no mobile strategy panacea for Baidu, it would give a greater visibility to its own mobile platform – spear-headed by its Android-based smartphones made by Dell and Changhong – as well as provide a mobile-oriented boost for products that are important to its bottom-line, such as its Hao123 links portal, since UCWeb is already doing this kind of mobile monetization very well. We contacted Baidu HQ in Beijing, but a representative could not be drawn to comment on any rumors.

When we talked to UCWeb’s Yu Yongfu in Beijing last month, he told us that his company makes up more than 50 percent of its revenue from advertising at present, and that it’s targeting China, India, and the US. Not because they can necessarily bring in the most revenue – making money from ads is especially tough in India – but because Mr. Yu sees those markets as the three main strategic mobile usage strongholds.

[Source: ChinaZ - article in Chinese]

The post Rumor: Baidu in Talks to Acquire Makers of UC Browser appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Link to full article

Read More

India: Going the Audio way, A look at Audiobooks Market in India.

For a country brought up on the tradition of oral history passed on from one generation to another it is a surprise that audiobooks took so long to gain mainstream attention. Audiobooks have for long been used in our country as means of teaching visually impaired students or for recording a piece of history in the form of the audio.

Audiobooks were never given the respect of their print counterpart, and were treated as a novelty feature for those who could pay. Karadi Tales a subsidiary of Amar Chitra Katha, was first to recognize the potential of the spoken word and began offering bundles of books and audio cassettes for the young readers in the late nineties. Karadi Tales enjoyed a tremendous fan following owing to the quality of their content, with many of the stories being read by famous actors like Naseeruddin Shah.

The recent onslaught of Internet enabled mobile computing devices has breathed a fresh lease of life in the audiobook industry. Leading the pack is Reado, India’s largest manufacturer and retailer of audiobooks in the country. If numbers are anything to go by, India is listening to books more than before. The largest number of sales of audiobook CDs for Reado comes from metropolitan towns with Mumbai leading. Though they are quick to add that the Tier II and III cities have also been bitten by the audiobook bug and the CDs being shipped there are increasing. What is interesting here is that the largest retailer Reado, currently offers only physical CDs currently at more than 200 book stores in the country along with online sales on Flipkart and Infibeam. They are launching a digital store with mobile apps for the audiobooks very soon.

Typically the audiobooks cost from Rs.199 to 599 though they may even go higher in certain cases depending upon the publisher and the reader of the audiobook. The biggest challenge facing the audiobook industry is surprisingly is not the lack of acceptance by the readers; rather still it has been the legal and other complexities of the system. The challenge of the licensing fees for the audiobooks followed by the taxes imposed by the government. The problem of arranging a good voice over artist, along with an effective background ground score to match the mood of the book are things to be considered which are vital to an aural experience. Piracy has always been a bane for the music industry and the same holds true for the audiobook publishers. But with recent technologies, many of them have started offering DRM free audiobooks with a watermarking feature to keep a track of the pirates.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for audiobooks and listeners as the market matures. The thing that would be most interesting in seeing is their use of Facebook Open Graph and other social discovery features to make listening a more community activity and maybe even allowing lending of audiobooks to one’s friends. As the competition heats up from other publishers who would like to audio publish their own books along with the response of retail giants like Flipkart and Infibeam, who might go the Amazon way and launch their own audiobook store like Audible.

[Image: Lifecycle of sound, source: wikipedia]

Link to full article

Read More

Infocomm Investments funds Twilio, Hoiio’s competitor

Infocomm Investments, the VC arm of Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority, has invested in San Francisco-based mobile development company Twilio, joining existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures and 500 Startups, announced CEO Lim Kuo-Yi in a blog post on 13th June.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Twilio offers developers an API that allows their apps to make and receive phone calls, as well as send and receive text messages. Singapore-based Hoiio, the winner of the People’s Choice Award at DEMO Asia, has a similar concept. But while Twilio has focused on being an app enabler, Hoiio has ventured into developing a suite of communication apps.

Infocomm Investments aims to “attract and nurture a vibrant pool of entrepreneurs and startups to enhance the technology depth and increase the diversity of Singapore’s tech scene.”

Through an investment in Twilio, it will lend its expertise to the company and help it expand to Asia, using Singapore as a natural beachhead.

With the boost, it’ll be interesting to see how Twilio competes with Hoiio. The latter has been around in the continent since 2007, giving them a headstart in countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and Vietnam. They are now looking to the West, having launched their API in the United States a few months ago.

Hoiio has 600 developers using its platform at last count, raising S$1.5M (approx. US$1.03M then) in funds and grants before 2010.

Twilio claims to have passed the 100,000 developer mark. The US rival is more well-funded too, raising a total of US$33.7M prior to Infocomm Investments’ involvement, with the latest being a Series C round in December last year.

Link to full article

Read More

VIPShop and Coo8 Say: Screw It, We’ll Deliver It Ourselves

Earlier this month we looked into the reasons behind two of China’s top e-commerce sites opting to deliver their own merchandise, subverting the fractured private delivery system that has been in place since online shopping first emerged in China. And now two more major sites, the recently listed VIPShop (NYSE:VIPS) and the electronics e-tailer Coo8, are making the same move.

VIPShop has submitted its application to authorities for a license to run its own nationwide courier service, as confirmed by Tang Yizhi, its vice president for logistics and customer service. He also revealed that with its current express delivery partners, S.F. Express and China Post’s EMS, the company hits a successful delivery rate of just 95 percent, which it feels it needs to up a few percentage points. The only way to do that is to manage its own logistics, even though it will cost 20 to 30 percent more compared to using its partner couriers.

As for Coo8.com, which is a subsidiary of the bricks-and-mortar retailer Gome (HKG:0493), its CEO revealed the site’s plans to establish its own in-house delivery team very soon, and which will employ several hundred by the end of the year.

A courier on an e-bike does the final leg of home deliveries. Some e-commerce sites want to dismantle this old system. (Image source: Donews)

To get into the groove for this, VIPShop has already started trial operations of its own courier service in Shanghai. Tang Yizhi says that even this limited running has produced exactly the kind of results his company wants to see: a greater percentage of successful deliveries, and reduced delivery delays by at least a half-day. Of course, that will be harder to replicate nationwide, especially in cities and provinces with less developed infrastructure.

And so China’s mature and highly-competitive e-commerce industry looks set to shake-up the logistics industry in the country, no doubt to the ire of established players like S.F. Express, but also the state-owned China Post. There remains the risk that Chinese e-commerce sites could find their own express delivery services being legislated against, if the powers-that-be make the partisan decision to protect China Post and the status quo.

[Sources: Marbridge Consulting (1) and (2)]

The post VIPShop and Coo8 Say: Screw It, We’ll Deliver It Ourselves appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Link to full article

Read More

Japanese Collaborative Diagram Service Cacoo Hits 500,000 Users

Japanese startup, Cacoo, the online diagram and wire-frame creator, has surpassed 500,000 users recently. We have been tracking and using Cacoo for more than a year ourselves, so we’re happy to see it reach this milestone. Readers may recall our team experimenting with its Google Hangouts feature a few months back.

The product was developed by Nulab Inc, a software company based in Fukuoka, Japan. You can catch the video below to find out more about the service. But in short, think of Cacoo as a collarborative wireframe creator. It brings all your team members together to build a diagram on a single page in real-time.

Cacoo grew from 200,000 users to 500,000 today. It has seen a fair bit of innovation in the last one year, including the stencil store that allows users to purchase new designs and templates for their diagrams. The Cacoo team also has a couple of representatives in Singapore to explore the Southeast Asia market too. We also met some of the reps in Indonesia as well.

We encourage you to give their service a try. We’re pretty sure you will like it too.

@williswee cacoo.com also has over 500,000 users from today.

— masanori hashimoto (@hsmt) June 14, 2012

The post Japanese Collaborative Diagram Service Cacoo Hits 500,000 Users appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Link to full article

Read More

How to: Issue shares with differential voting rights (the Mark Zuckerberg way)

The initial public offering of Facebook is talked about among different people for different reasons. For members of the legal profession, the most interesting aspect of the saga was the issue of control which the promoters held, in particular Mark Zuckerberg.

The interesting thing is this: Mark Zuckerberg because of all the dilution thus far holds less than 30% equity share capital but has around 56% voting rights in the Company. This majority control has been obtained through the issue of shares with differential voting rights.

Logic behind shares with preferential voting rights

In corporate law equity shares represent ownership of a company. As a holder of an equity shares, a person is entitled to certain rights. For instance, every shareholder gets voting rights and when the Company declares dividend, is entitled to dividend payments as well.

Simultaneously, certain liabilities arise. Namely, at the time of liquidation, the claims of an equity shareholder come after the claims of secured debtors, unsecured debtors and preference share holders.

With the advancement of corporate law and finance and as business became more and more complicated with the evolution of private equity, mergers and acquisitions, strategic investments and hostile takeovers, it became necessary for promoters of companies to protect their interests from the enemies at their gates.

With each investment into a company, the interests of the promoters also reduced proportionately, making it difficult for promoters to exercise their influence in a company and also paving way for hostile takeovers.

Hence the balance was struck…

The balance was struck by promoters issuing themselves a certain class of shares which were more rewarding than the others. The holders of such class of shares had more voting rights than the holders of the normal class of equity shares. These are known as shares with differential voting rights.

How can one issue shares with differential voting rights?

This can be achieved by dividing the equity share capital of a company into two or more classes. Each class will hold a predetermined ratio with respect to voting, for example:

Class A shares, one (1) equity share is equal to one (1) vote

Class B shares, one (1) equity share is equal to two (2) votes

Class C shares, one (1) equity share is equal to three (3) votes

The law in relation to issue of shares with differential voting rights in India is governed by Companies (Issue of Share Capital Differential Voting Rights) Rules, 2001, as amended, read with the Companies Act, 1956, as amended.

Issue of shares with differential voting rights can be done, by any company, if they satisfy certain conditions including that:

(a) the company has distributable profits for three (3) financial years preceding the year on which it was decided to issue such shares,

(b) the company has not defaulted in filing annual accounts and annual returns for three financial years immediately preceding the financial year in which it was decided to issue such shares.

Companies cannot therefore upon their incorporation issue shares with differential voting rights and will have to have waited for at least three (3) years to issue such shares, provided that they have issued dividend for all those three (3) years.

The initial years are very crucial for any start-up and with each round of investment the effective holding of the promoters goes down significantly and therefore it may become necessary to issue shares with differential voting rights to protect the interests of the promoters, while at the same time it is also essential that the investors in the company are brought on board, prior to making any such decision.

[About the author: Contributed by Hrishikesh Datar, founder of vakilsearch.com, online legal services provider (Legal Advice, Legal Documents & more.]

- Read more resources on legal/accounting

Link to full article

Read More

Takara Tomy Delivers Another Addition to Japan’s Growing Robot Dog Army

Photo: robots-dreams.com

Readers may recall a few months back when we wrote about Bandai’s Smartpet robot dog, which used an iPhone as its artificial brain. Well, apparently there’s a high demand for robot dogs in Japan, as famed toy maker Takera Tomy has gotten in on the action now as well.

Currently on display at the 2012 Tokyo Toy Show, the company’s I-SODOG is a robotic canine that features realistic movement thanks to 15 servo motors, and is capable of responding to over 50 voice commands. It also has smartphone integration (both iOS and Android), and can be controlled via an application, as you can see in the video from Gigazine below.

The I-SODOG can do dances and shake hands, and it you can also reward it for good or bad behavior which, according to Plastic Pals, will help it develop a ‘personality’ over time. It also comes with a remote controller as an alternative to controlling with voice commands or the smartphone app.

As you might expect, a fancy robotic pet like this isn’t going to come cheap, especially in Japan. And this one will retail for around 31,500 yen (or about $400). It’s expected to go on sale in 2013.

Other robot dogs in Japan’s growing arsenal are HPI’s G-Dog, and perhaps the leader of the pack, NSK’s robot seeing-eye dog. They were all fathered by Sony’s now retired Aibo, who – according to sources familiar with the matter – fathered them all in a wild three-month love affair with a snow blower.

[Source: Plastic Pals, Robots-Dreams]

The post Takara Tomy Delivers Another Addition to Japan’s Growing Robot Dog Army appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Link to full article

Read More