There are rumors in the tech industry in China that Microsoft-owned Skype and its China partner, TOM (HKG:2383), have already effectively ended their relationship after not renewing their partnership. Marbridge Daily has a good account of the rumors that it sourced from local news portal Tencent Tech, saying that the working agreement ended last year and that TOM is now running its TOM-Skype service out-of-contract and on a skeleton staff after reportedly firing a great number of staffers thought to be involved in the joint-venture.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft China, and will update if we find someone who can comment.
Marbridge writes:
When Tencent Tech called Wang Zhiyong, Tom Online’s employee in charge of Skype operations, Wang said he was away on business, adding that as Microsoft keeps a tight rein on discussions, he was unable to comment. Li Xiuli, Tom Online’s marketing director for online value-added services, said she had not been informed about the matter. […]
When speaking to several former Tom employees who recently left the company, Tencent Tech was told that the company has begun “transformative” layoffs of employees working on Skype, gaming, and the original online literature site Huangjian Shumeng, among other services. Layoffs have affected more than 100 people so far, with Skype employees accounting for such a large proportion of laid-off individuals that technical staff are reportedly almost all gone.
Word is that TOM Group execs are not seeing eye-to-eye with Skype over the China business, with Tom CEO Yang Guomeng thought to be in favor of dispensing with Skype altogether.
In addition to its Skype partnership, TOM Group runs news portals, online videos, and e-commerce sites, among other things. Its TOM-Skype partnership made worldwide headlines in 2008 when it was exposed how TOM was using keyword surveillance to censor some political or frowned-upon words, such as any references to Tibet during the racially-motivated unrest and violence in the region that was going on at that time.
mixi [J] has announced that from August 2012 they will launch “O Todoke Bin” (Notification Mail) as a new service of mixi Birthday [J]. Frenxxo [J] will carry out development and management.
With “Notification Mail,” it will become possible to purchase goods from a list starting with over 50 articles of interior miscellaneous goods and accessories , and you can give presents together with messages to “My Miku” mixi friends on their birthdays. When giving a present, the sender doesn’t need to enter the other person’s address. The receiver handles procedures for their address, and the mixi birthday executive office handles the delivery. To commemorate the launch of “Notification Mail” on mixi, they will be making a “0 yen sponsor gift.” With the “0 yen sponsor gift,” you can send your friends free of charge a total of 4,050 items of these 4 products: “Honeybee March Gift” (soap gift) and “Space Girl” (for bath use) by Lush Japan, “JANJAN Yakisoba Sauce” by Ace Cook, and “SOYJOY” by Otsuka Seiyaku.
“mixi Birthday” started service from digital gifts in February 2012, and already it has surpassed a total of 9.5 million celebrations. Also, they have decided to make the “10 million times achievement campaign” which will give the 10 millionth sender and receiver each a 100,000 yen H.I.S. travel voucher.
Line, Naver Japan’s popular mobile messenger app, has worked together with Telkomsel to make a special, localized sticker pack. While Line has been popular all over Asia ever since it launched over a year ago, this making local partnerships like this one should mean increased attention in Indonesia among smartphone users.
The free sticker pack is labeled as “Telkomsel Blob & MyAppsMall,” and contains cute emojis/emoticons you can use while chatting with your friends or family, just as with other sticker packs. But in this pack, Blob, the Telkomsel character, is being used as the main selling point.
If you’re planning a gaming startup in China, you could hardly choose a better location than Shanghai. At the opening of the CCG Expo in Shanghai this morning, Shanghai representatives announced that the city’s gaming industry’s value grew to 14.9 billion RMB (about $2.3 billion) in 2011. That’s a 24 percent jump over 2010, and that’s not all. At $2.3 billion, Shanghai now accounts for about 30 percent of the value of China’s games industry.
It also looks like there’s plenty of room to grow, especially in the mobile space. Web games accounted for 97 percent of the Shanghai industry’s value, with mobile games just a paltry three percent. However, mobile gaming is growing so quickly throughout China that I can’t help but imagine that number is going to balloon over this next year.
Shanghai already has 227 gaming companies — 215 of them private enterprises — but with fast growth and an apparent opening in the mobile gaming sector, it looks like a great spot for anyone looking for a location to found a mobile gaming startup.
A startup aimed at disrupting the conventional tourism industry by not focusing on the tourists but rather on the tour operators may seem like a bold move, but this exactly what VacationLabs aims to do. By enabling tour & activity operators to accept online bookings & payments on their website within minutes of signing-up for the VacationLabs service.
The idea is simple – tour operators either those present in remote locations or those in metropolitan cities without the money and the muscle, can start using VacationLabs instead of getting into the hassles of setting up a payment gateway or a website. Once the service is set up the operator can start cashing in on the service by booking packages.
In the present model, the payment mode for the VacationLabs could be done in two ways. Either the operator could pay depending upon the range of transactions he has in a month or it could use their technology for free and pay as and when they get a transaction. Currently operating under closed beta, VacationLabs is targeting operators especially in Bangalore, Mumbai and Goa in the initial phase. After the service launches publicly, CEO Saurabh Nanda promises a tons of offerings in the VacationLabs package.
Beginning with the basics, service is aimed at the operator who will be using it to customize as per his requirements. With customizations to manage features like the amount payment or minimum number of days among a host of others options. The dashboard makes it easy to keep a track of all the bookings along with a record of lost customers by keeping a tab of the visitors who left the booking process mid-way.
Coming along with it, is the concept of “offline booking” A vast number of independent operators rely upon their phone for bookings by giving out the account number for the payments as they don’t have the necessary set up to accept payment on their website. VacationLabs would allow the operators to update the booking availability via an SMS which in effect would update it on their website to avoid overbooking. Or they could even use the dashboard to update the offline payments.
A mobile website would also be a part of this offering which would enable the administrative controls for the tour operators. The service is compatible with CMS (content management systems) and other calendar services to make the process a breeze for the operators.
In a short and concise book, Clayton Christensen (famous for his theory on disruptive innovations) reflected on the lessons learnt in his career from business to academia and how the same lessons from company culture, motivation factors in hiring people and business ethics learnt can be translated to family life. Written together with two co-authors, James Allworth & Karen Dillon, the book introduced how our careers whether as an entrepreneur or corporate leader can provide us a mirror in how we view our family life.
In a very different set of lenses, Clayton Christensen’s “How will you measure your life?” runs on a similar theme with Reid Hoffman’s book “The Start-up of You”. What marks the difference is that the latter focuses more on the how-tos and provides a perspective more relevant for people who are beginning their careers. If the book is to be recommended, it is ideal for entrepreneurs who have started their families with kids or currently studying in a business school (likely a MBA or EMBA) and contemplating their next career moves or starting their own business. We often hear about the lack of work-life balance for entrepreneurs all over the world. That’s why this book might provide a guide to those who might have focused so much on their careers and neglected their family in the process. It also put a lid to the ethical dimensions in one’s career and he made an interesting mention that Jeffrey Skilling, the infamous CEO who brought down Enron, was his classmate from business school. It’s in the same thinking that he tried to explain why some people can end up losing their moral compass in the process and bring down the companies with them.
In the whole book, Christensen utilized interesting business theories from various management thinkers and adapts to two perspectives: business and family. With that line of thinking, he’s able to draw lessons that management of the family is no different from management of a business. As a matter of fact, both requires time and effort to build, maintain and sustain them. In short, I derived three interesting lessons from reading the book and one of them actually supported my thesis about hiring for start-ups that contradicted conventional thinking that is prevalent in Asia as a whole.
Do not give in to credentials in hiring but rather look at what the company really needs: One of the interesting theories he used was based on Morgan McCall’s book “High Flyers” and explained why many managers including start-up founders make hiring mistakes. While most hiring managers are only correlating the individual’s experience with the companies that they have worked in i.e. finding the right person with the companies they are associated with, a better model is to search for process capabilities, i.e. look for people who have developed abilities through the experience of failures, facing new challenges and dealing with a lot of situations. The author explained with a personal anecdote on how they recruited the wrong person by picking the one with credentials instead of the person who know the processes but just as capable when he was running CPS Technologies.
Culture starts from the family to the company: Christensen discussed the culture of innovation and creativity within Pixar and defined using Edgar Schein’s model: Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.” He made a strong point to why a lot of entrepreneurs or corporate leaders used the excuse to spend less time with family but make more money, and find themselves later that their own families suffer as a result. He also made suggestions as to how to help the children within the family develop their processes in learning and not outsourcing that to the teachers. That is accompanied with a tale about outsourcing and he made a good transition on how that goes with family as well.
The danger of marginal thinking: The author brought up two interesting case studies of NetFlix and Blockbuster, where the latter was in a dominant position and had complete control of killing the former as a disrupting business and yet chose to do nothing till it went bankrupt. We have seen a lot of large companies that are unable to stay innovative and relevant to change, and most of the time, the executives who made these decisions are working on marginal thinking with the hypothesis that the present products of the business are adequate to generate profits. The same can be said for people in his view, giving in to the “just this once” in facing moral dilemmas to do something wrong in their careers. Once they gave into the “just this once” which is a form of marginal thinking, they ended up in a deeper hole until they reach the point at which they cannot come out.
What I enjoyed about the book is the sense of perspective that he has placed on how one should balance their career and family and integrate work with happiness. In the end, all of us will go back to the same question that Christensen sought to address, “How will you measure your life?” Christensen has provided his perspective, how about the rest of us then?
An interview with Clayton Christensen via Forbes (below):
Author’s Note: The article is written before 30 June 2012. The opinions expressed in this article are his personal thoughts and do not represent or reflect the views of the company he is currently working for.
Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) is set to expand on the success of its Twitter-esque social media platform Weibo by launching a web TV service later today. At an event in Shanghai this afternoon, CEO Charles Chao is expected to unveil the social television service in partnership with Bestv New Media (SHA:600637), a Chinese company that has long specialized in web and mobile TV.
Aside from all that, details are scant, and we’ll need to see the service in action later today. The lack of a hardware partner suggests this won’t be based around a smart TV platform, which have really taken off in Japan and China in recent years. Instead, this is likely based entirely in the Weibo.com site, and will join a whole host of other social features that Sina has created in the past year such as social gaming and a virtual currency.
As such, Sina’s web TV will be a new challenge to the video-streaming sites in China – such as Youku, Tudou, Baidu’s Qiyi, and Sohu TV – with their mostly licensed TV serials and movies. With over 300 hundred million registered users, Sina Weibo offers a substantial captive audience to advertisers, and web TV will give more scope for advertising revenue.
Jakarta-based MM Cab is hoping to replicate the success of Uber, the private taxi/limo service from San Francisco. But MM Cab is bringing a lot more speed and glamour to its business by using Ferraris and Porsches. And so the yellow-liveried Ferrari model pictured here – the 360 Modena, which is not the very latest breed of Ferrari’s mid-engined V8s – could be taking you home. Albeit quite slowly through Jakarta’s notoriously awful traffic.
MM Cab soft-launched yesterday. The map on the company’s homepage suggests that it has four supercar taxis so far. The Porsches are Boxster S (2011) models. You can also interact with the firm on Twitter. MM Cab promises well-trained drivers who really know the city, and uses a normal taxi rate so it will be affordable for most middle-income people. It aims to expand to other big cities in the near future.
To promote the service, MM Cab is giving out free rides to anyone who can “catch” the taxi from now until July 18th. That’s where its afore-mentioned map comes in handy. And the effort has been paying off so far, with the hype around the Ferrari and Porsche cabs making people curious, talking about it a lot on Twitter. After the promotion, the service will be launched officially.
I believe since folks in Indonesia, especially Jakartans, tend to be relatively early adopters then the service will be fully booked before you know it. MM Cabs are not as technologically equipped as Uber, however, in areas like mobile payment. I believe with time – and greater smartphone adoption in the city – that will improve.
