Indonesia’s e-commerce event to be held in conjunction with an online shopping fair

The Venue of E-Commerce Tour and Shop Fair (Credit: IdeoWorks)

Following the formal announcement of its association few months ago, another e-commerce event is due to be held in Indonesia. Happening from July 12 to 14 and hosted by Ideosource and one day city delivery service Konek.us, this ‘E-Commerce Tour’ will be held in conjunction with an ‘Online Shopping Fair’.

Touring the nation’s heavyweight e-commerce companies such as Kaskus, Multiply, Gramedia Bibli and homegrown Venture Capital will be the agenda for the first day. There would also be incubator Ideosource and Merah Putih present. This is the chance for foreign e-sellers to meet the respective local players.

On July 13, ShopFair Conference titled ‘The Secret of Successful Online Store’ will be feature leading experts from Bhinneka, eBay, Google, Multiply, Nokia, Telkomsel, Tokopedia, Indonesian E-Commerce Association (id-EA) and many more. the day’s plan is designed as a melting pot for e-commerce players to extend their business networks and share information amongst themselves while also facilitating e-sellers to meet their consumers offline.

Estimated to attract at least 500 attendees, the conference will also bring in certain aspiring figures such as Google Southeast Asia SMB Sales Manager, Erika Oktora, Telkomsel Head of Mobile Commerce Division, Denny Abidin, SVP Marketing XL Axiata, Tommy Wijaya, Founder of Bhinneka.com, Hendrik Tio, Tokopedia founder, William Tanuwijaya and Hanifa Ambadar, FemaleDaily’s CEO.

The session is complemented with networking lunch triumphed by major media and conference speakers. Networking dinner with retailers and fast-moving consumer goods companies will end the second day.

Around 40 booths and three labels – Adidas, Ari Seputra, Dollhouse – have given their commitments to participate in the two day event. Local magazine SWA Sembada reported that ShopFair Chairman Andi S Boediman targeted at least 10,000 transactions with the average transaction value of IDR 500,000.

Both fair and conference are organized by recently-born digital media and creative agency IdeoWorks and is to be held at Epicentrum Walk, a venue which is no stranger for most of Jakarta-based start-ups.

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Indonesia’s e-commerce event to be held in conjunction with an online shopping fair

The Venue of E-Commerce Tour and Shop Fair (Credit: IdeoWorks)

Following the formal announcement of its association few months ago, another e-commerce event is due to be held in Indonesia. Happening from July 12 to 14 and hosted by Ideosource and one day city delivery service Konek.us, this ‘E-Commerce Tour’ will be held in conjunction with an ‘Online Shopping Fair’.

Touring the nation’s heavyweight e-commerce companies such as Kaskus, Multiply, Gramedia Bibli and homegrown Venture Capital will be the agenda for the first day. There would also be incubator Ideosource and Merah Putih present. This is the chance for foreign e-sellers to meet the respective local players.

On July 13, ShopFair Conference titled ‘The Secret of Successful Online Store’ will be feature leading experts from Bhinneka, eBay, Google, Multiply, Nokia, Telkomsel, Tokopedia, Indonesian E-Commerce Association (id-EA) and many more. the day’s plan is designed as a melting pot for e-commerce players to extend their business networks and share information amongst themselves while also facilitating e-sellers to meet their consumers offline.

Estimated to attract at least 500 attendees, the conference will also bring in certain aspiring figures such as Google Southeast Asia SMB Sales Manager, Erika Oktora, Telkomsel Head of Mobile Commerce Division, Denny Abidin, SVP Marketing XL Axiata, Tommy Wijaya, Founder of Bhinneka.com, Hendrik Tio, Tokopedia founder, William Tanuwijaya and Hanifa Ambadar, FemaleDaily’s CEO.

The session is complemented with networking lunch triumphed by major media and conference speakers. Networking dinner with retailers and fast-moving consumer goods companies will end the second day.

Around 40 booths and three labels – Adidas, Ari Seputra, Dollhouse – have given their commitments to participate in the two day event. Local magazine SWA Sembada reported that ShopFair Chairman Andi S Boediman targeted at least 10,000 transactions with the average transaction value of IDR 500,000.

Both fair and conference are organized by recently-born digital media and creative agency IdeoWorks and is to be held at Epicentrum Walk, a venue which is no stranger for most of Jakarta-based start-ups.

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4 Tech Startups in Asia That Caught Our Eye This Week

This week we saw four tech startups featured on Tech in Asia. They all originate from different countries — Indonesia, India, Singapore, and China. Catch the list below with some other startup related stories which you might have missed:

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1. BeliFurniture | Indonesia

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Founded in January 2012, BeliFurniture.com claims to be the biggest office furniture reseller in Indonesia with 5,000 products posted…

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2. Strollay | India

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Many e-commerce sites sell apparel. But few focus on ethnic outfits — Indian in particular — such as Sarees and Salwar Kameez. Based in Surat, Gujarat in India, Strollay is an e-commerce site that does just that, selling Lehenga Sarees, Lehenga Choli, and Kurtis/Tunics…

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3. Perx | Singapore

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Perx, the Mobile loyalty stamp card app, has passed along some interesting statistics through an email update to all users. Launched late last year, the startup has helped merchandisers generate 260,000 ‘chops’ (or stamps) across 600 active locations…

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4. Kuai Pijiu | China

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China’s vibrant and increasingly niche e-commerce sector now has a site just for buying quality beer. Called Kuai Pijiu (literally: “quick beer”) it sells the kind of imported beers – with an emphasis on German brands like Paulaner and Krombacher (pictured below); but sadly no Benderbrau – that can only be bought in specialist outlets in some parts of China…

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Startup related stories

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• CyberAgent Ventures to Open Korea Office and Investment Fund

• More Support for Singaporean Entrepreneurs in China with ACE–Tsinghua Collaboration

• What Is Your Startup Vacation Policy?

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full coverage of the hottest and most innovative startups in the region, you can click here or subscribe to our Asia startups RSS feed. For tips and news, sent us a note via editors[at]techinasia.com

The post 4 Tech Startups in Asia That Caught Our Eye This Week appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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iOS Dev Scout reflects on recent Hackathon and growing the iOS developer community in Singapore

iOS Dev Scout began with a dream to bring all the iOS developers in Singapore together. We wanted interactions, updates about iOS technologies and tools, and hacking sessions together to build great iOS apps.

Started just six months ago by us (Subh, Michael and Mugunth), the Hackathon was the first of such a big event that we ever organized other than our monthly meetups. Sayanee and Chinmay joined the team to help us in organizing and promoting the event.

During the organization process, we made connections with many developers (both iOS and from other programming languages) and picked up valuable advice on how to organise fruitful hackathons whereby participants not only learn, but also meet new friends in the developer world while most importantly, having fun. We were honestly dead tired when we went home after the hackathon, but looking back every minute of it was worth it!

Below are our individual experiences, development as well as feedback that we’ve gained throughout this organisation process. We hope other teams who want to have such a similar event will also benefit from this post.

Running the Hackathon

Keep it small and simple the first time. Our aim was a tight number of a cosy 50 participants, with little budget. However, as the demand increased, we expanded the capacity to 70 participants.

We would like to specially thank our sponsors iDA, Plug-In@BLK71, BuUuk, Quantum Inventions, Bubble Motion, ELC Tech, Viki, Cloudy Rec for supporting this event.

During iOS Dev Scout

We wanted to encourage young students and people who don’t have prior experience of iOS or Objective-C to pick-up the technology and build something over 24 hours. Hence, we started our day with few basic iOS and Obj-C tutorial sessions. We had close to six coaches who helped the participants whenever they were stuck.

Winning Teams

In the true spirit of motivating developers to learn, break and make great iOS apps, we purposefully did not keep any prize money for this. However, we rewarded a few teams and individuals with Amazon Gift Cards who showcased remarkable attitude and built great apps within 24 hours.

The organizer’s favorites were Alan’s Shadow that was done by a group of NUS students and Thumbatar developed by Daniel, Elisha and Akira. We also had a wonder kid Yan, a polytechnic student, who picked up iOS on the same day and built a working twitter client in 24 hours. Almost all the teams have plans to launch their apps on AppStore after small modifications. We have planned to get developer certificate for the group to encourage more developers. The complete list of notables is available on our blog: http://iosdevscout.com/an-awesome-hackathon

Personal Takeaways

Get a good venue with ample lighting, access to fresh air and wifi and power! The venue was awesome for us and this was important in order to have a conducive environment.

Make a schedule and announce it to the participants before the event. In this way, we had the flexibility of arranging timeslots for mentors and coaches to come in and also pace the teams to do their progressive Show & Tell

Organise fun activities right in the middle of the night. The programmers not only had a breather from their coding, but also fresh air and huge laughter playing some simple games and stretching and messages for them!

Have plenty of fruits and drinks. We bought plenty of drinks and fruits as snacks for our programmers and that gave them boosted energy throughout the hackathon.

Have a realistic view of the attrition rates. We tracked it through our pre-hackathon survey and got an approximate estimation about the amount of food we need to order for supper and breakfast.

Have progressive show & tell throughout. We had multiple show and tell throughout the event. That not only gave confidence to the participants but helped them to track their progress. Yabber was one such team who pivoted their idea after the first show and tell.

Code together in one big hall. We took extra effort to setup the venue to accommodate everyone in one big room. We had all our demo, show and tell and announcements in that room. The coaches were always available to help the participants. We had more interaction and collaboration. And the idea of coding together in one big hall really worked.

Our next steps for iOS Dev Scout

We noticed a huge demand for learning iOS and Objective C. Thus, we will organize multiple workshops in the future that will be a launchpad for developers who are willing to learn iOS and Objetive-C basics. We will continue with our monthly meetups and coffee break sessions to engage interaction between our group members. The next Hackathon would probably be held in the next 6 months.

Join our Facebook group to get latest updates about our events and activities.

Link to full article

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iOS Dev Scout reflects on recent Hackathon and growing the iOS developer community in Singapore

iOS Dev Scout began with a dream to bring all the iOS developers in Singapore together. We wanted interactions, updates about iOS technologies and tools, and hacking sessions together to build great iOS apps.

Started just six months ago by us (Subh, Michael and Mugunth), the Hackathon was the first of such a big event that we ever organized other than our monthly meetups. Sayanee and Chinmay joined the team to help us in organizing and promoting the event.

During the organization process, we made connections with many developers (both iOS and from other programming languages) and picked up valuable advice on how to organise fruitful hackathons whereby participants not only learn, but also meet new friends in the developer world while most importantly, having fun. We were honestly dead tired when we went home after the hackathon, but looking back every minute of it was worth it!

Below are our individual experiences, development as well as feedback that we’ve gained throughout this organisation process. We hope other teams who want to have such a similar event will also benefit from this post.

Running the Hackathon

Keep it small and simple the first time. Our aim was a tight number of a cosy 50 participants, with little budget. However, as the demand increased, we expanded the capacity to 70 participants.

We would like to specially thank our sponsors iDA, Plug-In@BLK71, BuUuk, Quantum Inventions, Bubble Motion, ELC Tech, Viki, Cloudy Rec for supporting this event.

During iOS Dev Scout

We wanted to encourage young students and people who don’t have prior experience of iOS or Objective-C to pick-up the technology and build something over 24 hours. Hence, we started our day with few basic iOS and Obj-C tutorial sessions. We had close to six coaches who helped the participants whenever they were stuck.

Winning Teams

In the true spirit of motivating developers to learn, break and make great iOS apps, we purposefully did not keep any prize money for this. However, we rewarded a few teams and individuals with Amazon Gift Cards who showcased remarkable attitude and built great apps within 24 hours.

The organizer’s favorites were Alan’s Shadow that was done by a group of NUS students and Thumbatar developed by Daniel, Elisha and Akira. We also had a wonder kid Yan, a polytechnic student, who picked up iOS on the same day and built a working twitter client in 24 hours. Almost all the teams have plans to launch their apps on AppStore after small modifications. We have planned to get developer certificate for the group to encourage more developers. The complete list of notables is available on our blog: http://iosdevscout.com/an-awesome-hackathon

Personal Takeaways

Get a good venue with ample lighting, access to fresh air and wifi and power! The venue was awesome for us and this was important in order to have a conducive environment.

Make a schedule and announce it to the participants before the event. In this way, we had the flexibility of arranging timeslots for mentors and coaches to come in and also pace the teams to do their progressive Show & Tell

Organise fun activities right in the middle of the night. The programmers not only had a breather from their coding, but also fresh air and huge laughter playing some simple games and stretching and messages for them!

Have plenty of fruits and drinks. We bought plenty of drinks and fruits as snacks for our programmers and that gave them boosted energy throughout the hackathon.

Have a realistic view of the attrition rates. We tracked it through our pre-hackathon survey and got an approximate estimation about the amount of food we need to order for supper and breakfast.

Have progressive show & tell throughout. We had multiple show and tell throughout the event. That not only gave confidence to the participants but helped them to track their progress. Yabber was one such team who pivoted their idea after the first show and tell.

Code together in one big hall. We took extra effort to setup the venue to accommodate everyone in one big room. We had all our demo, show and tell and announcements in that room. The coaches were always available to help the participants. We had more interaction and collaboration. And the idea of coding together in one big hall really worked.

Our next steps for iOS Dev Scout

We noticed a huge demand for learning iOS and Objective C. Thus, we will organize multiple workshops in the future that will be a launchpad for developers who are willing to learn iOS and Objetive-C basics. We will continue with our monthly meetups and coffee break sessions to engage interaction between our group members. The next Hackathon would probably be held in the next 6 months.

Join our Facebook group to get latest updates about our events and activities.

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UnPluggd – Live.

You can watch UnPluggd live @http://www.pluggd.in/live

You can also follow us on Twitter (@pluggdin) for live-coverage (official hashtag #unpluggd).

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Bookkeeping tips for lean startups (Part 1 of 2)

A first of two parts, this series provides bookkeeping techniques for entrepreneurs looking to adopt a lean startup approach.

The accounting industry thrives on entrepreneurs who are not diligent in filing and bookkeeping. Therefore, here are four easy things you can do to cut your year-end bookkeeping bill by 30 percent in your first year of business.

1. Open a corporate bank account

Do yourself and your company a favour. If you have not set up a corporate bank account, do so tomorrow. Open the account, and deposit 10 grand. Say goodbye to it – it now belongs to the company.

Draw down only from this account so you can visually track expenditure every month from a single statement. By having a single account means you only need to reconcile a single statement.

To open the bank account you will need the directors of the business to be present with proof of identity. You will also need the company MAA and bizfile.

We favour Standard Chartered and HSBC because of their friendly internet banking interface.

2. Open mail weekly

Collect mail daily but only open it weekly. With a cup of coffee in one hand, sit and open every piece and either throw it out immediately if it’s not relevant, or file it in a plastic concertina folder.

A plastic concertina folder costs $10 and has tabs so you can file according to transaction type. Print out any important receipts from drop box or email – file them as well. Attach sticky notes instructions.

Operation only takes 15 minutes per week.

3. Pay stakeholders monthly

Set a billing cycle and let your stakeholders (suppliers and staff) know what date they can rely on you to get paid. You will earn the status as a reputable paymaster, which will earn you loyalty and favours when you need them.

Be a consistent pay master. If you are consistent, stakeholders will trust you and will stop bothering you with emails and phone calls to get payment. Poor paymasters are deprioritised. Consistent paymasters are prioritised.

Practice this disciple and negotiate better payment terms because you have street cred. When you do get an inquiry, ask them to send questions to your finance email address.

4. Pay yourself monthly

Set aside a day somewhere quiet where you cannot be interrupted. Take the month’s worth of transactions out from your concertina folder, and place them in piles.

Open your cashbook in Excel and key in the month’s revenue and expenses. Open your expenses claim Excel sheet and key in expense claim items.

5. Download templates

That’s it. Do this consistently every month, you can save 30 percent on your annual cost of bookkeeping. Download template cashbook and personal expense claim forms. Download templates to help get you started.

You can also take a look at this presentation to learn more about bookkeeping for your startup, or view more presentations from Futurebooks Pte Ltd.

About Futurebooks

Futurebooks is Singapore’s and Hong Kong’s most progressive bookkeeping company. Futurebooks offer affordable incorporation, bookkeeping, business planning and brokering, to entrepreneurs with big ambitions.

Whether your goal is to be acquired or to be more profitable this quarter, Futurebooks provide planning to keep your business on track and bookkeeping services that streamline the journey.

Using cloud computing solutions like Intuit’s QuickBooks Online, Xero, SaaSu, DropBox, Workflowmax, Vend, salesforce.com and Google Enterprise, Futurebooks are able to offer clients productivity improvements and reductions in the cost of accounting.

Visit Futurebooks or follow them on Twitter here.

About the author

Anthony Coundouris is the founder of an accounting and analytics firm Futurebooks Pte Ltd. Anthony is obsessed with helping start-up companies incorporate, conduct industry analysis and develop positioning. He has ten years experience in media and marketing, and was founder of Firestarter, a digital marketing agency.

Firestarter was acquired by Novus Media in 2010.

Link to full article

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Bookkeeping tips for lean startups (Part 1 of 2)

A first of two parts, this series provides bookkeeping techniques for entrepreneurs looking to adopt a lean startup approach.

The accounting industry thrives on entrepreneurs who are not diligent in filing and bookkeeping. Therefore, here are four easy things you can do to cut your year-end bookkeeping bill by 30 percent in your first year of business.

1. Open a corporate bank account

Do yourself and your company a favour. If you have not set up a corporate bank account, do so tomorrow. Open the account, and deposit 10 grand. Say goodbye to it – it now belongs to the company.

Draw down only from this account so you can visually track expenditure every month from a single statement. By having a single account means you only need to reconcile a single statement.

To open the bank account you will need the directors of the business to be present with proof of identity. You will also need the company MAA and bizfile.

We favour Standard Chartered and HSBC because of their friendly internet banking interface.

2. Open mail weekly

Collect mail daily but only open it weekly. With a cup of coffee in one hand, sit and open every piece and either throw it out immediately if it’s not relevant, or file it in a plastic concertina folder.

A plastic concertina folder costs $10 and has tabs so you can file according to transaction type. Print out any important receipts from drop box or email – file them as well. Attach sticky notes instructions.

Operation only takes 15 minutes per week.

3. Pay stakeholders monthly

Set a billing cycle and let your stakeholders (suppliers and staff) know what date they can rely on you to get paid. You will earn the status as a reputable paymaster, which will earn you loyalty and favours when you need them.

Be a consistent pay master. If you are consistent, stakeholders will trust you and will stop bothering you with emails and phone calls to get payment. Poor paymasters are deprioritised. Consistent paymasters are prioritised.

Practice this disciple and negotiate better payment terms because you have street cred. When you do get an inquiry, ask them to send questions to your finance email address.

4. Pay yourself monthly

Set aside a day somewhere quiet where you cannot be interrupted. Take the month’s worth of transactions out from your concertina folder, and place them in piles.

Open your cashbook in Excel and key in the month’s revenue and expenses. Open your expenses claim Excel sheet and key in expense claim items.

5. Download templates

That’s it. Do this consistently every month, you can save 30 percent on your annual cost of bookkeeping. Download template cashbook and personal expense claim forms. Download templates to help get you started.

You can also take a look at this presentation to learn more about bookkeeping for your startup, or view more presentations from Futurebooks Pte Ltd.

About Futurebooks

Futurebooks is Singapore’s and Hong Kong’s most progressive bookkeeping company. Futurebooks offer affordable incorporation, bookkeeping, business planning and brokering, to entrepreneurs with big ambitions.

Whether your goal is to be acquired or to be more profitable this quarter, Futurebooks provide planning to keep your business on track and bookkeeping services that streamline the journey.

Using cloud computing solutions like Intuit’s QuickBooks Online, Xero, SaaSu, DropBox, Workflowmax, Vend, salesforce.com and Google Enterprise, Futurebooks are able to offer clients productivity improvements and reductions in the cost of accounting.

Visit Futurebooks or follow them on Twitter here.

About the author

Anthony Coundouris is the founder of an accounting and analytics firm Futurebooks Pte Ltd. Anthony is obsessed with helping start-up companies incorporate, conduct industry analysis and develop positioning. He has ten years experience in media and marketing, and was founder of Firestarter, a digital marketing agency.

Firestarter was acquired by Novus Media in 2010.

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Jindong (360buy) will open its platform in 2 months

Very soon, all the pinterest clones in China will have more than the Taobao products to capitalize on. Jindong Mall (aka 360buy), one of the largest online retailers in China, will open its platform in 2 months, said an industrial source. “Just like Taobao’s ‘Grand Taobao’ project, Jindong will have its ‘Grand Jindong’ project,” the source said.

Taobao affiliation program, a key component of Grand Taobao project, have been the backbone of all the pinterest-like social ecommerce services in China, such as Meilishuo, Mogujie and so on. Taobao (actually the small individual Taobao sellers) pays them commission when they help to sell Taobao products to their users. For example, Mogujie, one of the largest, fostered a monthly sales of over RMB 120 million (US$ 19 million) for Taobao with more than 3 million registered users and 1.2 million daily UV last year.

It makes people wonder what if Taobao decided to lower their commission or even not to support them anymore, especially, right now Taobao has its own pinterest-like services, called Taobao WOW. In fact, there is rumor that Jack Ma, CEO of Allibaba Group, told his staff in an internal meeting that, in the short term Taobao will support the pinterest clones, but in the long term it will squeeze them out, and replace them with Taobao’s own pinterest-like service.

However, if Jindong opens its platform, this is no longer an option of Taobao. This is because if Taobao ceases to support the pinterest clones, they might switch to promote Jindong’s products, a move Taobao cannot risk to happen.

With Jindong taking the lead, all major e-commerce players in China, such as Vancl, Dangdang might soon follow. In the future, opening your own e-commerce site will be very easy, as all the fulfillment and logistics are taking care of by the major e-commerce player. You just need to take care of the front-end, whether this is a website or a mobile app. I believe there will be a lot of such players, and the key of their success lies on how to attract and retain users.

Related posts:

1. Problems with China’s Logistic Industry
2. More Trouble For Alipay? Chinese Banks To Compete Into Online Payment Space
3. Now You Can Do eCommerce Directly on Sina Weibo, 360buy is the First Trier

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Weixin 4.2 to Come with Video Chatting

Are you also addicted to Tencent’s messaging service Weixin and keep on chatting nonstop? Good news. The upcoming new Weixin 4.2 will be adding video chatting and many cool functions.

The new version is still in beta and according to some insiders, it’s very exciting. Some highlights about the new Weixin:

• will be available on Web (need a cell to log in though)
• supports video chatting
• supports Bluetooth car kit
• has more powerful security and privacy control
• has a refreshing UI

Currently the web version of Weixin can only be accessed by scanning a QR code with a Weixin 4.2-installed phone. Interestingly, the URL for web Weixin is: next.qq.com, which makes people wonder if it’s a proof for the rumor of Tencent considering transforming Weixin into the QQ in mobile area. In the company’s restructure move in this May, QQ and Qzone were integrated into the Social Networking Group, and Weixin was organized into the Corp. Development Group. Tencent certainly wants to build Weixin into its next QQ in the territory of mobile.

With more than 100 million (433 days after debut) users announced in this March, Weixin pulled off sensational success and has become a phenomenon in Chinese mobile Internet world. Allen Zhang, the lead of Weixin team once said Weixin would not just be a communication tool but also a life style.

screenshot of Weixin 4.2

Related posts:

1. K-Touch Founder Rong Xiuli: Cloud Synchronization might change App Store
2. Sina Launches Walkie-Talkie Service Sina Weiyou
3. Jiepang Celebrates Two Year Anniversary with New App

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Report Predicts China Mobile Game Players Hit 192 Million by Year-End

According to a report by market researcher Niko Partners, China’s mobile game players will hit 192 million by the end of this year, surpassing the number of PC players in China, which is expected to reach 180 million by year-end.

Another point raised in the report is that mobile game revenue is likely to grow six times  from last year’s $600 million to billion dollars in the next five years.

VentureBeat cited Lisa Cosmas Hanson, the managing partner of Niko Partners saying that “Niko projects fast growth in mobile games revenue in China led by the rising adoption of 3G usage, soaring sales of smartphones from a wide array of vendors, and the desire to play entertaining, inexpensive games on these smart mobile devices”.

Well, let’s take a look at some numbers.

According to ad agency GroupM Interaction, by 2011 in China there’re:

• 190 million smartphone users
• 360 million mobile Internet users
• 120 million 3G subscribers

which means at least 240 million mobile users access mobile Internet via much slower 2G network. And according to GSMA, China’s mobile Internet speed ranked second to last, only better than India.

My point here is, without a relatively mature mobile Internet infrastructure, China’s mobile gaming industry might not grow at the expected fast pace. Meanwhile, lacking of sophisticated mobile payment solution and attractive mobile titles are the other factors that hinder mobile monetization across the board.

screenshot of Wei Zhuang, a popular mobile game by Tencent

Related posts:

1. Live Blog: How to become the next ‘Zuckerberg’ #gstartup
2. A8 Invests $100M into Social Site Kaixinai.com
3. Baidu Phone on Sale by Year’s end?

Link to full article

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Sogou Broke up with Alibaba for a Potential IPO?

Local media reported that Sohu just bought back 10,88% of Sogou from Alibaba, a move ending a two-year long relationship between the two since Alibaba invested into Sogou in 2010, the same year Sogou was spun off from Sohu as an independent operation.

The valuation of Sogou now is $0.237 billion, which increased by over 70% compared to 2 years ago. According to Sohu’s Q1 earning reports, Sogou pulled in $ 23 million in revenue, growing by 184% year over year and the company is having more than 1300 staff now. Things look good, so what makes this change?

No material coopration

People used to be optimistic about the cooperation between the two. Think about Taobao’s commodities showing in Sogou’s search engine. One gets the traffic and one gets the money, isn’t it perfect match? However, during the past two years, we didn’t see any real collaboration actually. Sogou wanted a strategic partner, but Alibaba clearly seems just to be an investor.

In the previous stage, Sogou revealed that they once offered a safety online shopping browser specially customized for Taobao, but was rejected by the partner. Two months later, Alibaba launched an independent price engine, etao.com. Conflicts in business like this made the cooperation even harder. From Alibaba’s view, Sogou may be expecting too much, for the investment is more of a defensive move.

Getting Ready for IPO?

National Business Daily reported that Sogou has been preparing for a new round of fund raising from investors before its IPO, though the company gave no comments on that by now. The current valuation of Sogou ($0.237 billion) is far from its target valuation of $ 2 billion. And rumor has it that Alibaba is in need of money for the privatization of its B2B company and the buy-back of stakes from Yahoo!.

Browser and search engine are the two main businesses of Sogou. Sogou has replaced Google China as the No.2 in Chinese searching area, only next to Baidu in 2010. Earlier this year, Baidu once offered to acquire Sogou at the price of its target valuation, the offer was rejected. Sogou has its own ambition.

Sogou tried to compete with Baidu by leveraging on its browser, but met a stronger competitor, Qihoo 360 whose browser if far more popular, ranking No.2 in China, only trailing Microsoft’s IE browser. It seems that Sogou is stuck in the No.2 dilemma. After the breakup, Sogou still needs to complete many missions before its IPO.

Related posts:

1. Live Blog: How to become the next ‘Zuckerberg’ #gstartup
2. Firefox China Calling Developers, Getting More Energy to Inspire Chinese Web
3. Six Business Models Built On Sina Weibo, Monetizing Microblog in China Sounds Easy

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Xiaomi Phone Profit Margin Reaches 20%?

Xiaomi could generate a gross profit margin of more than 20% percent on its own-branded smartphone, according to a teardown analysis by a Chinese semiconductor analyst.

Xiaomi phone’s profit margin is always a mystery to outsiders. Lei Jun, founder and CEO of the company first claimed to make not even a dime off hardware, saying software and Internet services are how Xiaomi makes money. Later on he admitted that the company gets RMB between 100 and 200 yuan by selling every Xiaomi phone. On the other hand, Zhou Hongyi, CEO of Qihoo 360 which just jumped into the own-branded smartphone war of Chinese Internet companies and launched its own smartphone AK47, insisted that the profit margin for Xiaomi phone could be as high as RMB 700 – 800 yuan.

Liu Hui, a Chinese semiconductor analyst concluded after a teardown analysis that the reasonable profit margin for Xiaomi phone would be 20%, or more than RMB 400 – 500 yuan, while the cost for Xiaomi phone is around 1500 yuan.

An Analysys International analyst said that, Chinese phone vendors’ profit margin varies as some could get up to 40% while the others could only get as low as 10%. So Xiaomi’s 20% is not a bad score.

Especially in a time when the so-claimed “making money off Internet service rather than on hardware” practice hasn’t been really proved yet.

Related posts:

1. Live Blog: How to become the next ‘Zuckerberg’ #gstartup
2. A8 Invests $100M into Social Site Kaixinai.com
3. Baidu Phone on Sale by Year’s end?

Link to full article

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Lean Startup Machine Running in Shanghai

Shanghai-based TechYiZu just organized their very first Lean Startup Machine event couple weeks ago at People Squared’s “Yanping Attic” co-working space, with the guest appearance of Ray Xu, one of Lean Startup Machine’s very own organizers who had flown from the US to attend the event.

So, what is Lean Startup at all?

 

Lean Startup (Machine) in a Nutshell

“Lean Startup” is a term (process) coined by Eric Ries, and involves rapid, iterative prototyping to test assumptions and to develop a product that customers actually want (lean doesn’t refer to being a startup running on the ‘cheap’, but refers to a mindset focusing on reducing ‘wasted work’ by building products that there are real consumers for).

The Lean Startup Machine is an intensive three-day workshop, which teaches Lean Startup methodologies and the relevant applications for product, customer, and business model development.

The workshops kicked off last night with attendees pitching their product ideas and the formation of teams, that attendees would be working with for the duration of the weekend. Each team was coached by Ray Wu on developing their problem hypothesis, solution hypothesis and a series of assumptions that will be core to the success of each team’s business model.

The goal of The Lean Startup Machine is to “Get Out Of the Building,” and speak with real customers to collect cash or non-cash currency, which serves as validation or invalidation of each team’s riskiest business model assumptions. (Non-cash currency is considered a behavior that demonstrates intent to use a product, and can range from usage time, email submission, or a signed letter of intent.)

The whole process of the workshop exercise is to promote the problem-centric approach to business ideation, by continuously validating or invalidating assumptions. With each invalidation, each team is forced to pivot their solution toward a true customer pain.

Sounds fun? Check out their Day 1 and Day 2 recap. Also you can sign up their mail list to get the latest updates about coming events.

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Kaixin001 Ramping up Open Strategy, Isn’t It Too Late?

Chinese SNS site Kaixin001 seems to be too conservative and slow in its open strategies. The company announed open efforts in 2010, but did not really open it until early 2011, which is not a prompt move at all compared to its competitor Renren, whose open platform was launched in 2008. Yesterday the company shared with media the latest score of its open platform: 132 open APIs and 40k 3^rd party apps.

Since late last year, Kaixin001 has put forth a revenue share strategy in which 3^rd party developers can have favorable share terms especially for those small ones. The latest move is to allow ad network like Google Adsense and Alimama on conditions that user experience will not be interrupted.

CEO Cheng Binghao said, “We are doing this for 3^rd party developers’ sake. By doing so they can easily locate the target users, thus earning more revenues.” Some successful stories include the9, Happyelements among others. Both the9 and Happy Elements developed games on Kaixin001’s platform.

The opening up of SNS sites has turned from a trend to a must. A recent report on the open platform situation and trend by 51CTO.com pointed out that, a SNS open platform should tout to more 3^rd party developers with resources and revenue sharing planning. Offer them the best and they will be coming.

The new report card of Kaixin001 did show its determination to open up, but isn’t it too late? In the summer of 2007, Facebook pioneered in opening its platform, which marked a new developing model. Very soon, Chinese companies headed to join or were forced to join the open warfare. People said that 2011 was the first year of the Open Era in China’s tech world, with big names like Tencent, Shanda, Alibaba and even B2C sites like 360buy and Amazon China followed the trend.

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Big Ten Accounts for 80% of Chinese Group Buying Market

According to Hu Chen, co-founder of Tuan800, a Beijing-based think tank of group buying, Chinese group buying market has gone through the blind expansion phase and now has been seeing a new wave of consolidation during which more and more services are being shut down everyday and the big guys are gobbling more market share.

Hu said that, by this May there’re only 2996 daily deal sites in China, while more than 60% of which isn’t really in operation, down from the peak of nearly 6000 last year. Also, it’s getting harder for the minor ones to gain market share as the Big Ten literally accounted for more than 80% of the market share altogether.

The big ten, according to Tuan800, includes 58Tuan, Ftuan, Gaopeng, Meituan, DianpingTuan, DidaTuan, Lashou, Manzuo, Nuomi and 55Tuan.

Meituan claimed more than 400 million in sales in this June, up from 365 million in May. Dianping and 55Tuan generated more than 200 million in sales in May while 58Tuan, Ftuan, Lashou, Manzuo and Nuomi all made it to the 100 million club.

Speaking of consolidation, 55Tuan took over Ganji’s group buying business in this April, then Gaopeng got merged with Ftuan just now. And we’re expected to see more similar merges in the near future.

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Tencent Debuts Revamped Homepage

Tencent, the largest Chinese Internet company by market cap just debuted a major revamp of its homepage with simplified layout and deeper integration of the company’s social network offerings like Tencent Weibo, QZone and Pengyou.

On the new homepage, a big Soso-powered search box is placed right next to the logo of QQ.com, highlighting the importance of Soso Tencent’s search effort.

A small toolbar that integrated QQMail, QZone, Pengyou and Tencent Weibo is pinned on the top right corner, where you’ll get real-time notification across these sites.

In the middle of the homepage, people who logged in will see the stock trends of their own picks, new episodes from their most watched shows on Tencent Video and so on.

The overhaul implied that Tencent again led its peers in riding the trends of personalization of Internet. These new personalized modules cater to everyone’s needs and then display suitable contents to them accordingly. Unlike the previous version where different people see the same old thing, now different people log into QQ.com and then will discover contents curated just for them.

Chinese portal site’s homepage has long been criticized for too long too messy that sometimes chokes people’s eyes. Refer to Sina and Sohu if you want to see for yourself, and hopefully Tencent is making a great start that people would follow. Stop choking our eyes!

 

screenshot of Tencent’s new homepage

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Sohu Buys Back 10.88% of Sogou from Alibaba

Sohu’s latest Form 8-K filing with SEC showed the portal site will buy back 24 million Series A preferred share of its wholly-owned subsidiary Sogou from Alibaba. The deal approximately equals to 10.88% of the outstanding share capital of Sogou at a purchase price of $ 25.8M.

A quick review from the beginning: In August, 2010, Sohu announced to spin off its search subsidiary Sogou as an independent operation, CTO Wang Xiaochuan took office. Two months later, Alibaba Investment Limited invested $ 15 million in exchange for 10% of Sogou’s shares.

Sohu’s earning reports of Q1, 2012 showed that Sogou pulled in $ 23 million in revenue, which increased by 184% year over year.

Currently, the search engine company has more than 1300 staff.

 

Here is an internal mail from the CEO, Wang Xiaochuan.

Dear Sogou fellows, 

Sougou started operating as an independent company since October 2010, when we received investment from Alibaba and Yufeng Fund. In the following 20 months, with the help and efforts of every Sogouer, we have together achieved some exciting results: 

Firstly, We have increased our search market share by over twice, replacing Google as the second biggest Chinese search engine in October 2011.

The revenue rose by 8 times, and we started to profit in Q3 and Q4 of 2011. Meanwhile, our team is also growing, the staff number has risen by 3 times and surpassed 1000 in Q1 last year, which ensures a greater strategy forehead.

In the second half of the year, we will upgrade the Sogou Pinyin Input Method, Sogou Browser, and the search engine and soon will launch some new PC and wireless products.

Considering our constant upgrading strategy, we are not so sure if Alibaba could keep on supporting us strongly on strategic level. With negotiation, we decided that Sohu would purchase back shares of Sogou while continue the cooperation with Yunfeng fund to further our development. 

On behalf of the Sogou team, I would love to express our gratitude to the help Alibaba group has been giving us all along. I am also looking forward to Sogou’s future growth and breakthroughs in this inspiring Chinese Internet industry.

 Wang Xiaochuan

CEO of Sogou

July 2^nd  2012

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Indian Online Retailer Myntra to Raise Another $25 Million?

Indian online retailer of lifestyle and fashion products, Myntra.com, is reportedly set to secure investment from Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management to the tune of $25 million, according to The Times of India citing unnamed sources [1]. The same two American investors recently pumped more than $100 million into Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart.

While the Times of India says that the Myntra co-founder Mukesh Bansal ‘denied he had closed any fund raise,’ when we contacted Myntra representatives, they could not at the moment comment, but did not specifically deny the news either.

Should the rumor be true however, then Myntra would have secured a total of $74 million in investment since it started operations in 2007. This would also be the fourth round raised by the Bangalore-based company as it had previously secured $20 million in February of this year, $14 million in November 2010, and $5 million prior to that.

In addition to all that, here is this interesting speculation on Asian Correspondent that there might be a possible acquisition or merger between Flipkart and Myntra in the investors’ mind. Letsbuy was the main challenger to Flipkart just a while ago, until Flipkart bought Letsbuy for $25 million in February. There are similar traits to that story and Myntra: now both Myntra and Flipkart have the same two investors as well. Interesting, right?

Amidst the rumors, it looks like Myntra is doing very well at the moment. Here is some insight to Myntra’s operational size made by Mukesh Bansal last month:

We currently get around 8,000 orders a day. Since we are exclusively into fashion and lifestyle, we are holding almost 20 to 30 percent market share in this segment. Myntra has been doubling in revenue every five to six months consistently for the past 15 months. We used to average about 4,000 transactions about five months back and today we have doubled this figure. Our average transactions have also grown by over 25 per cent as compared to last year.

Bansal also hopes that his company can come close to being a billion dollar business in the next four to five years.

[Source: Times of India]

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1. The Times of India did not explicitly cite unnamed sources in the article, but given the size of this investment, we decided it would be responsible to follow up with them, and that’s what we are told.  ↩

The post Indian Online Retailer Myntra to Raise Another $25 Million? appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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PHP, Python and Ruby: Which language is right for your startup?

An awesome session organised by StartupRootsSG that packed HackerspaceSG saw the geeks in town gathering to listen to what the gurus of the scene had to say about the subject matter.

This post is supported by IDA to promote student developers throughout the tech startup community.

On the panel was Michael Cheng representing PHP with 10 years of PHP development experience, Sau Sheong, who is lovingly called the Code-father and has written quite a few books on Ruby, most recently being Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby, and lastly Calvin Cheng, who runs his own consulting firm doing agile development methods with Python. Moderating the panel was Raymond Tay, whom many remember for having given an awesome talk on CUDA at GeekcampSG 2011.

Kudos to iDA for their support (and pizzas!), and HackerspaceSG for offering their space for the night.

So at the start, the panelist were invited to take shots at each other, and ultimately, it was agreed that PHP has the largest pool of developers to hire from, but it did not help that a large number of PHP developers were not up to par, so hiring takes longer. Ruby was fashionable, but some (Calvin) felt that it was too fashionable and he just wanted something that worked. In the end, Michael mentioned that if it was a team that had no prior experience, then Python would be the best, because the language forced developers to adopt best practices (Indentation and all that).

Then it moved on to open to the floor, where they talked about NoSQL versus RDBMS, and generally it all ended up with all three panelists agreeing that RDBMS was still the preferred option eventually, with NoSQL databases being the caching layer.

The hottest topic was on hiring, and Calvin provided some interesting insights on how he gives out salaries as a business owner, and he mentioned that for fresh grads who are “Smart and get things done” they deserved at least S$3,800. For people who practically do everything, iOS, Android, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sysadmin, Database Admin, well, they deserve S$8,000 and above.

So, how do you as a business owner hire developers? For those who don’t have technical background, well, try hiring a top developer to help you interview developers. Key things to look out for in developers: ability to learn fast and get stuff done really fast.

And finally, all three agreed that there are indeed gems in Singapore polytechnic institutions, and we should give them a chance to prove themselves, instead of always going for people who have years of experience. Who knows? They might surprise you.

So what do you think? For more language wars information, check out the cool infographic below from Udemy.

Slideshow:

Fullscreen:

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