Report Says Japan Very Active on Twitter, But Among Slowest in Growth

Image: japanese.ruvr.ru

French research group Semiocast has released an interesting report showing the top countries and top cities in terms of Twitter accounts. Perhaps the most stunning figure is that the microblogging service surpassed half a billion total user accounts in June of this year [1].

The US tops all countries, way out front with over 140 million Twitter accounts, comprising over 27 percent of all user profiles, but after that things get interesting. Fast-growing Brazil has overtaken Japan for the second spot, and Asian nations Indonesia and India also rank high in fifth and sixth respectively.

While Japan loves Twitter, as we have noted before, Semiocast points at the country’s slow growth of 17 percent in six months. But at the same time, Japanese-speaking users are second only to English in terms of the most active languages.

In terms of growth, the only country that was slower than Japan was South Korea which only grew 16 percent. This makes sense as both nations have very little room to grow in comparison to up-and-coming developing regions like India and Indonesia. This is part of the reason why we’re seeing so many Japanese internet companies looking to overseas markets recently.

Looking at the top cities listed, Jakarta ranks as number one, followed by Tokyo in the second position. Indonesia is also well represented by Bandung in sixth. Incidentally, Bandung is the site when we plan to hold our Startup Asia Hackathon in October, and we encourage you to attend and Tweet as much as you want!

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1. Note that to call them active Twitter users would be a little imprecise. Semiocast looks at 517 million Twitter profiles created before July 1st, and of course a user profile does not mean an active user. Like any report of this nature, however, it would be best not to put too much faith in any single data set, but rather for a fuller understanding collect information from as many sources as possible.  ↩

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Naukri brings Hari sadu back in a gaming avatar [Olympics game]

Hari Sadu, the arrogant and unreasonable boss is back in action with the newly launched Facebook game by Naukri.com.

The Facebook game is called ‘The Big Clash’ where users can play Boxing, Archery as well as Shooting with Hari Sadu as the target. These games were chosen keeping in mind India’s representation in London Olympics in similar categories. These three multilevel games have been interestingly named as ‘Knock him out’, ‘Flex the bow’ and ‘Pull the trigger’.

Each of these games has three levels where the players get to assault Hari Sadu with guns, bows or gloves.  Also, Hari Sadu will not keep taking these hits lying down, and will keep giving befitting replies to every blow, thus adding spunk to the whole exchange.   It allows players to challenge friends from their Facebook friend list and the community. Users can also keep a track of their scores and  ranking vis a vis the other players through a live score board. It has been a developed on a HTML5 platform, thus making it user friendly with all the internet browsers.

What could have added more fun to this game? Well, a customizable Hari Sadu, where you can add your boss’s pic and hit the target!

Recommended Read: Guide: How to enjoy the Olympics 2012 online?

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Jakarta is world’s top Twitter city; other Asia-Pacific nations make strong showing

Jakarta has been ranked the top Twitter city in the world by Semiocast, a Paris-based company that provides data intelligence and research on social media. The cities are ranked based on the number of posted tweets.

The company says that the results are based on a sample of 1.058 billion tweets in June this year. Tokyo, in second place, is not far behind, while Bandung (Indonesia), Singapore, Osaka and Seoul also made the list.

In its ranking of top Twitter nations, Semiocast looked at the number of Twitter accounts in each country. Japan comes out as the top Twitter nation in Asia-Pacific in fourth place, while Indonesia is close behind in sixth. Philippines and South Korea are also in the top 20.

Semiocast has also reported that Twitter has hit half a billion accounts in June, including 140 million in the United States alone. User base growth in Japan and South Korea has slowed.

Check out the full report.

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IRCTC introduces IMPS Payment facility

IRCTC has introduced IMPS Merchant Payments (P2M – Person-to-merchant) payment option that allows customers to make instant, 24*7, interbank payments to merchants or enterprises via mobile phone. IMPS enables mobile banking users a facility to make payment to merchants and enterprises, through various access channels such as Internet, mobile Internet, IVR, SMS, USSD.

IMPS: How to get started

In order to use the IMPS payment facility, customer needs to be a mobile banking user of their respective bank and apply for MMID (Mobile Money Identifier, a 7-digit number provided by the bank). This number is used to identify customer Bank and is linked to the account number. The combination of mobile number and MMID is unique for the particular account, and customer can link same mobile number with multiple accounts in the same Bank, and get separate MMID for each account.

- Get M-PIN. M-PIN is Mobile PIN, a secret password that is provided by Bank to customer. Customer needs to authenticate transaction using M-PIN

- Download mobile banking application or use SMS / USSD facility provided by the Bank. In order to perform IMPS transactions, customer needs to download mobile banking application or use SMS / USSD facility provided by the Bank

- Perform transaction using mobile banking application or SMS / USSD facility.

The service is chargeable at Rs. 5 for transaction amount upto Rs. 5,000/ and Rs. 10 for above. Supported banks include Union bank of India, SBI, Kotak Mahindra bank and Canara bank (read instructions on how to generate OTP).

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Video Shopping Startup CuriousCatch Launches Today

Singapore-based startup CuriousCatch.com is diving into the e-commerce battlefield today. But it is approaching it with a twist — using video as an extra factor to engage its consumers. The e-commerce site will feature only Asian designer stuff. So far, the startup claims to have over 20 brands who are going to feature their designs on CuriousCatch over the next couple of weeks, including Uyii (Singapore), Faab (Malaysia), and Daycraft (Hong Kong).

Each product, for now, will be accompanied by a personal product video introduction by Daylon Soh, the founder of CuriousCatch. He gave us a statistics from Zappos that says that video demos can actually increase sales by 6 to 30 percent which I thought is pretty remarkable. Daylon remarked:

We will continue to introduce about 10 to 20 new brands monthly sourced from around Asia. The eventual goal is to position ourselves as the Home Shopping Network for products with good design. Creating informative video content and sourcing our products from Asia are steps we’re taking to set ourselves apart from the rest of the retail offerings out there.

CuriousCatch, though officially launched today, has already attracted 500 users to its site, who mainly are from Singapore. The concept of video shopping isn’t new to the world, of course. But in Southeast Asia it is certainly quite a fresh idea.

Just one thing to note which I thought could be an interesting point to ponder on — While Singaporeans enjoy high-speed internet, I’m not sure which surrounding country, in general, could match up to its broadband speed. If done well, videos are sweet and engaging but it sucks when they don’t load. The video (see below) doesn’t load well for me now as I’m in Indonesia. It takes about five minutes to finish loading it. Plus, videos are expensive/effort intensive to create which deters many e-commerce players to just stick to text-based offerings with a SEO guru driving traffic to it.

But it isn’t impossible, of course. The approach is fresh and I must admit that I do understand the product much better and therefore would be more likely to buy the bag below if I actually needed it. So that’s a big thumbs-up for creating such experiences and I urge you to give CuriousCatch a try today.

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China’s Maxthon Takes Its Browser to the Mac [REVIEW]

China-based Maxthon, makers of web browsers for numerous platforms, is now venturing into new territory: the Mac. The brand-new Maxthon for Mac has just been launched, and is based on the Google-run open-source Chromium project that also forms the basis of Chrome browser.

That means, from day one, Maxthon for Mac supports all of the tens of thousands of useful Chrome extensions that have already been made. Maxthon has set up its own extensions portal (see it here) that currently only features six. But you can head to the Chrome store and download stuff directly from there instead:

Unlike with the rather awkward feel of the QQBrowser for Mac (actually the first Chinese-made browser to hit OS X), being based on Chromium makes Maxthon for Mac feel very familiar – and speedy. It’s a thoroughly modern browser too; it passes the Acid3 test web compatibility test with full marks, and its HTML5 ability gets a score of 385 – beating the 346 I see on my newest Firefox 15 beta.

Maxthon’s Karl Mattson, chief of product development at its San Francisco office, told the SF Examiner this week that Maxthon now has 130 million users worldwide across Windows, Android, and all its other platforms. Taking a veiled dig at Google, he told the paper:

Users will often literally tell us they don’t want a single company providing and maintaining their web mail, search and web browser.

That is indeed one reason to use Maxthon over Chrome. And to keep cross-platform users happy and in sync, there’s also support for the Maxthon Passport via the smiley-face blue square that’ll be familiar to its fans.

But in some areas Maxthon for Mac lacks the attention to detail that most Mac users would expect. A prime example is the way that the makers failed to use an icon that is at least 512-pixels square, so as to show clearly in “cover flow” view. The result is that it looks pixellated:

Another gripe is that Maxthon hasn’t bothered to revamp (as it could, in an open source project) the very awkward downloads process in the browser, which is reminiscent of much earlier versions of Chrome when the browser window elongates slightly to give you the “Discard” or “Save” options. My main issue during my short test was that Maxthon for Mac was a memory hog. A check in my Mac’s Activity Monitor showed that a process called “Maxthon Worker” (separate from the main Maxthon process) quickly grabbed 100+ MB of my RAM, and was sometimes running a quarter of my CPU as well. And that was with just two or three tabs open as I was taking the screenshots you see here. You might have better luck with it.

Maxthon for Mac is a 40MB download from its new homepage, and is 120MB once installed. It requires OS X 10.6 or later. It’s not yet in the Mac App Store. Here are a couple more shots of it in action:

(Click to enlarge)

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