Baidu Maps Gets 8-Bit 3D Views, Makes Real Life Feel Like Sim City

This is the view when fully zoomed in on the new Baidu Maps feature.

China’s biggest search engine, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), is hosting its annual Baidu World event today, so new features are being dished out like free coffee. Here’s another. Baidu Maps has gotten a couple of pretty sweet new features in the form of a highly-detailed 3D digitized landscape for some cities – sort of like in the game Sim City. At full zoom, you can make out Mao’s portrait very clearly atop Tian’anmen (pictured above), or see the cherry trees in bloom outside a hall in Shanghai (pictured below).

Click to enlarge!

The other new feature for its online mapping service is a 360-degree tour of select iconic buildings.

But the digitized 3D maps – which feel almost like 8-bit computer game images, but more detailed – will be more useful for most folks than the 360-degree tours, giving a pretty clear view of all the buildings in an area, with the building’s name revealed by mousing over it. At the moment, all this new action occurs only in the desktop-based version of Baidu Maps, and not its apps for Android or iOS.

The revamped Baidu Maps marks the fourth-generation of the service. It’s up against Google Maps in the country, as well as Tencent’s Soso Maps which have a different standout feature: photographic StreetView-type images for lots of cities. But apparently Baidu reckons this funky cartoon-esque view will be more useful. China’s top search engine does also have a satellite view, which launched late last year.

Click to enlarge the view of Shanghai's financial district.

As revealed by the watermarks on the 3D images – on the few cities where they actually work, such as Beijing and Shanghai – the new Baidu feature is actually licensed from Edushi, a digital mapping service which has been doing these neat and cutesy maps for years, I recall. (I dread to think how China’s fast-changing urban landscape will impact the artists who have to make these maps and keep them updated).

Earlier today, Baidu also rolled out a major relaunch of its mobile browser for Android, Symbian, and Windows Phone, indicating that it’s thinking carefully about its mobile strategy too.

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Learn more about TechSparks 2012 – The largest India-wide discovery platform for Indian tech startups

SGE caught up with Chandan from YourStory.in via email to learn more about TechSparks 2012, the largest India-wide discovery platform for tech startups.

What is YourStory’s TechSparks campaign all about?

TechSparks 2012, in its third edition, is India’s Biggest Tech Startup Discovery Platform by YourStory.in designed to discover and showcase emerging high potential product and technology start-ups from across India. As part of this year’s TechSparks campaign – YourStory.in organized Regional Round Tables in 5 cities – Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad and through this five month campaign have interacted with over 2000 emerging entrepreneurs from across India, many of whom are building some really cool and innovative products and solutions.

We have shortlisted the best 30 startups from all of them and will be showcasing them at the TechSparks 2012 Grand Finale in Bangalore as YourStory’s 2012 TECH30. 15 of these best 30 startups will be pitching their venture at the event, which also includes other insightful sessions on scaling sartups and engaging panel discussions.

How has the Indian Startup scene grown over the last two years?

We are in a very exciting phase of the evolution of the Indian startup eco-system and the last couple of years have been just the beginning of what is yet to come. Startup and Entrepreneurship being a buzzword five years ago has now taken a centre stage, especially in the tech community. Thanks to the Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga’s of the world and the latest Instagram buzz which has encouraged many Indians to dream big, be courageous and startup. And few local success stories like Gluster, SlideShare and few soon to be billion dollar start-ups like InMobi, Flipkart, SnapDeal and others have upped the mood and brought in lots of optimism in the whole Indian startup ecosystem and we are looking forward to how things pan out from here.

How has TechSparks been part of that growth?

TechSparks, being a discovery platform for emerging Indian product and technology start-ups has been constantly helping and supporting early-stage entrepreneurs during their initial phases of their startup journey providing them with visibility, access to investors, mentors and strategic corporate connect as appropriate to enhance and scale their businesses.

15 of the 30 emerging tech start-ups discovered through TechSparks last year have successfully raised funding, one has got acquired and one is scaling globally and has acquired a Northern Ireland startup. So, we are very proud of the quality and pedigree of our TechSpakrs start-ups till now and are striving hard to discover and showcase more such emerging product and technology innovations from across India. The complete list of last year’s TECH30 start-ups is available here.

What are some of the more notable startups from the previous TechSparks?

All of our previous TECH30 startups are working on innovative products and solutions in their own space. Some of the notable ones are -

United Mobile Apps, a mobile / broadband / wireless technology company that focuses on connection management, device management and data synchronization software with products like UConnect, UManage, and USync (Raised $1Mn Series A funding from Mumbai Angels)

Heckyl, provides real time financial information, news analytics and heatmaps to get exclusive coverage of markets, companies and businesses (Raised $1mn funding from Seedfund)

Freshdesk, an on demand customer support software that allows companies to support customers across their traditional customer support channels like phone, email, chat etc. and also through new social channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc. (Raised $5mn funding from Tiger Global and Accel Partners)

Forus Health – Developing low-cost portable, intelligent, non-invasive, non-mydriatic eye pre-screening device that can detect the above 5 major ailments (Raised $5mn from IDG Ventures and Accel Partners)

Which startups (or what type of startups) should attendees look forward to seeing at TechSparks 2012

At this year’s TechSparks 2012 we are looking forward to unveiling our next batch of TECH30 startups who are working on innovative and cutting-edge technology solutions in the fields of Education, NLP, Big data analysis and reporting, e-payment, mobile streaming, financial analytics, secure enterprise cloud, voice signatures, agri tech and more.

SGE’s readers have a 50% discount code – TS2012SGE50.

If you need more information about TechSparks, please get in touch with chandan@yourstory.in

SGE is proud to be a Media Partner of TechSparks™.

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Is Japan a place for tech startups?

So you speak Japanese and you love the startup scene. The next thing to do then is to find out more about expanding your business to Japan right? But hold on, there are things you must first know about the economy.

An article written by Yu Shinohara, founder and CEO of Tokyo based one-stop social communication platform service startup, EverConnect, states that the Japanese economy situation was getting worse since 2008 global financial economy shock. 114 companies had IPO at Tokyo Stock Exchange market in 2006, but only 23 companies managed to have IPO in 2009. ZERO foreign company had IPO at Tokyo Stock Exchange market since 2008. New generated funds have been decreasing since 2008. Most traditional Japanese large companies can not keep their own headcount and have since stop hiring. On the other side, lots of internet startups were born in these couple of years because the economy situation freed the business space for startups.

After 2011, an a more supportive startup environment has been developing quickly in Tokyo with events for techies and creatives.

However,  according to Yu, Silicon Valley still remains the best place for startups in the world. The main startup city in the Asia Pacific region is changing to Singapore, Shanghai or Beijing instead of Tokyo. Tokyo has a lot of potential, but Japan is still a very closed country for foreign people and hard to stay for non-Japanese speakers, which is only one of the reasons for the shift.

As Yu noted, the Tokyo Stock Exchange is a good market for startups because it is easier to IPO than NASDAQ, and it is possible to raise larger funds than Singapore Catalist.

Tokyo’s environment is getting better for startups who want to raise around US$60,000 in angel or seed funding, but there are few VCs who want to invest less than US$1 million range in second or third round. Many seed accelerators started investing in the past two years, but most of Japanese VCs have conservative mind because they rely on traditional banks, security, insurance companies and they don’t have experiences with such investments. 80 percent of fund investors are finance organizations. Japanese VC usually tend to invest after round B phase of IPO model startups instead of M&A model startups, because there is no M&A culture in Japan. Very small numbers and amounts of funds are structuring since 2008.

These big issues for Japanese startups should be solved soon, but it will take a few more years.

On the other side, Silicon Valley has the largest eco-system in the world based on over 20 years of experience. Many bright and young individuals are moving to Silicon Valley to study at Stanford University, to work at the startups there. These too draws investors as well. The unique ecosystem in Silicon Valley allows startups based there to raise money at higher valuation, which would enable them to drive their own business quickly, and this environment helps them  to be acquired by big players.

Japan is trying to catch up with Silicon Valley but most of Japanese investors are less likely to invest in startups with a M&A target model, because there M&A cases are very rare in Japan. The IPO target model with equity finance based fundraiser or stable business model without invested money is the best to go for entrepreneurs who want to start or expand their business in Japan.

To read more about Yu’s opinions on the Japanese tech startup ecosystem, read his original post on things founders should know about the Japanese economy when starting or expanding your business to Japan.

*Elizabeth is the co-editor for e27 and is currently visiting Tokyo for the month of September. She is interested to meet and find out more about tech startups in Japan. She can be reached at elizabeth[at]e27.sg or on Twitter at @elizabethtan33.

Photo Credits: Elizabeth Tan

 

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Is Japan a place for tech startups?

So you speak Japanese and you love the startup scene. The next thing to do then is to find out more about expanding your business to Japan right? But hold on, there are things you must first know about the economy.

An article written by Yu Shinohara, founder and CEO of Tokyo based one-stop social communication platform service startup, EverConnect, states that the Japanese economy situation was getting worse since 2008 global financial economy shock. 114 companies had IPO at Tokyo Stock Exchange market in 2006, but only 23 companies managed to have IPO in 2009. ZERO foreign company had IPO at Tokyo Stock Exchange market since 2008. New generated funds have been decreasing since 2008. Most traditional Japanese large companies can not keep their own headcount and have since stop hiring. On the other side, lots of internet startups were born in these couple of years because the economy situation freed the business space for startups.

After 2011, an a more supportive startup environment has been developing quickly in Tokyo with events for techies and creatives.

However,  according to Yu, Silicon Valley still remains the best place for startups in the world. The main startup city in the Asia Pacific region is changing to Singapore, Shanghai or Beijing instead of Tokyo. Tokyo has a lot of potential, but Japan is still a very closed country for foreign people and hard to stay for non-Japanese speakers, which is only one of the reasons for the shift.

As Yu noted, the Tokyo Stock Exchange is a good market for startups because it is easier to IPO than NASDAQ, and it is possible to raise larger funds than Singapore Catalist.

Tokyo’s environment is getting better for startups who want to raise around US$60,000 in angel or seed funding, but there are few VCs who want to invest less than US$1 million range in second or third round. Many seed accelerators started investing in the past two years, but most of Japanese VCs have conservative mind because they rely on traditional banks, security, insurance companies and they don’t have experiences with such investments. 80 percent of fund investors are finance organizations. Japanese VC usually tend to invest after round B phase of IPO model startups instead of M&A model startups, because there is no M&A culture in Japan. Very small numbers and amounts of funds are structuring since 2008.

These big issues for Japanese startups should be solved soon, but it will take a few more years.

On the other side, Silicon Valley has the largest eco-system in the world based on over 20 years of experience. Many bright and young individuals are moving to Silicon Valley to study at Stanford University, to work at the startups there. These too draws investors as well. The unique ecosystem in Silicon Valley allows startups based there to raise money at higher valuation, which would enable them to drive their own business quickly, and this environment helps them  to be acquired by big players.

Japan is trying to catch up with Silicon Valley but most of Japanese investors are less likely to invest in startups with a M&A target model, because there M&A cases are very rare in Japan. The IPO target model with equity finance based fundraiser or stable business model without invested money is the best to go for entrepreneurs who want to start or expand their business in Japan.

To read more about Yu’s opinions on the Japanese tech startup ecosystem, read his original post on things founders should know about the Japanese economy when starting or expanding your business to Japan.

*Elizabeth is the co-editor for e27 and is currently visiting Tokyo for the month of September. She is interested to meet and find out more about tech startups in Japan. She can be reached at elizabeth[at]e27.sg or on Twitter at @elizabethtan33.

Photo Credits: Elizabeth Tan

 

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No Kotak, Ecommerce CoD is NOT meant to collect interest in savings bank account

Ecommerce companies started CoD to gain customer trust and while CoD (Cash on Delivery) has been debated in various forums, Acce’s Subrata Mitra shared the following with us (read: Interview with Accel’s Subrata Mitra : “part of the reason people use CoD is because of convenience (1-click doesn’t work)”)

“Trust factor would start getting better as some of the players get bigger & create recognizable brands; likewise, more Internet savvy consumers are starting to pay online (since the base was small, its taking a long time to get that # to critical mass). Also, we think that part of the reason people use CoD is because of convenience (1-click doesn’t work). As the segment evolves, so would payments & consumer maturity, and we should be able to get a reasonable balance in terms of CoD vs others.”

Kotak Mahindra bank has taken CoD to a new level by equating it to ‘payment delayed’ option – that is, if you avail CoD, you can continue making ‘interest’ money on your savings account!

CoD = Savings! (Via: Kotak's Facebook Ad)

Well, you cannot blame Kotak Mahindra bank for this ‘lack of understanding’. Ecommerce companies started the trend and now banks too have started recommending customers to not avail online payment option.

What’s the way out? Should companies start charging extra for CoD? Sharing K. Vaitheeswaran, CEO of Indiaplaza’s views (from an earlier interview)

There are no free lunches. CoD costs money, we pay this amount to service providers and we have no choice but to pass it on to consumers who wish to avail of this service. CoD in my view is a very inconvenient payment option for consumers and merchants and we encourage our customers to pay online. Over 95% of all orders on Indiaplaza.com are paid online; less than 5% are paid through CoD. This also reflects the high trust factor consumers have on Indiaplaza. Normally customers prefer CoD on sites where they are unsure of delivery.

Thoughts? Are customers to be blamed for their lack of interest in buying things online (read: Why Indians do not buy online)?

Recommended Analysis on Ecommerce :

• Why you should stay away from e-commerce in India [A Perspective]
• What has Product Management got to do with Ecommerce?
• My seven (hard-hitting) questions to Indian ecommerce businesses

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Sparxup 2012, Indonesia’s leading startup conference, calls for submissions

Sparxup, Indonesia’s leading technology conference and startup competition is back. Happening in Jakarta from 3rd to 5th October, Sparxup 2012 boasts high-quality international speakers, knowledgable local practitioners, world-class engineers and amazing local and regional tech startups.

Startup Pitching Competition, Hackathon, XXX Conference

There are three things happening at Sparxup 2012 – Startup Pitching Competition, Hackathon, XXX Conference. At the startup pitching competition, startups can apply to pitch on stage in front of a panel of judge. For the Hackathon, you can get a chance to build and hack and stand a chance to win the “Sparxup 2012 Hackathon King” title. Hackathon participants will submit their ideas for an app using one of the supported platforms – Foursquare, Evernote and Nokia. The top 30 ideas will then form teams to develop the app to be judged.

Perhaps the highlight of this year’s Sparxup is the keynote from the conference. The theme for this year’s conference is XXX: eXplore, eXecute, eXpand. Representatives from Foursquare, Evernote, Netprice, Thomson-Reuters, Microsoft and Yahoo! Indonesia will gather and discuss about Indonesia’s tech scene. Some of the confirmed speakers for Sparxup 2012 includes Akshay Patil, developer evangelist for Foursquare, Troy Malone, managing director of APAC Evernote, Teruhide Sato, group CEO of Netprice Japan, Mohan Belani, director at e27, Jeremy Wagstaff, chief technology editor APAC of Reuters, Zane Adam, senior director of Azure Microsoft, as well as Ferry Tenka, CEO of Groupon Indonesia.

Sparxup 2012 calling out for applicants for its Startup Pitching Competition

With a series of exciting programme lined up, Sparxup is now calling for promising startups to apply and pitch at its pitching conference. Sparxup is well known for its startup competition, which have produced a total of 47 startup finalists in the last two years.Unlike previous Sparxups where startups can use powerpoint slides to showcase their products, startups will have to demo their products at Demo Day in front of judges, investors and selected audience in a private environment. Each startup will have five minutes to demo their product and also have a chance for a one sentence pitch on stage during the awards night.

If you are a startup looking to set up a presence in Indonesia, Sparxup 2012 is definitely the platform for you. So wait no more and head over to the official Sparxup website to register for a slot.

Event Details:

Date: 3 – 5 October, 2012

Venue: Plaza Bapindo, Jakarta

Address: Jln. Jend. Sudirman kav. 54-55, Jakarta Selatan. 12910.

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Philippines startup founders meet at Founders Drinks Manila

Earlier last week, PayrollHero, Proudcloud and Kickstart came together to organize Founders Drinks Manila in the Philippines. The event saw more than 50 attendees attending and networking with one another at the PayrollHero office.

Founders Drinks Manila started off with a casual networking session, which was followed by a quick introduction from everyone. During the round of introduction, all the attendees were required to answer three questions in the manner of: ” Who are you? What is your company? What are you looking to get out of tonight?”. The quick round of introductions saw answers ranged from people wanting to talk about the Philippines government, fund raising to just pure wanting to meet fellow founders. Read Jay Fajardo of Proudcloud’s earlier guide to the Philippines startup scene to have a better idea of what’s happening in the country.

Stephen Jagger, one of the cofounders of PayrollHero, also the coorganizer of Founders Drinks Manila, told us that there were no speakers planned on purpose and the event was meant to be a by-invitation only networking event. The event was meant for startup founders who are working on their startups in the Philippines. Some of the startups that were present included Proudcloud, Bolooka, Duets, Collab, FamilyKo, Galleon, Guestlist.ph, Kickstart, Orchestrack, Social Project and Zap.

The event was a huge success and everyone enjoyed the session. The organizers would also like to thank Amazon Web Services for sponsoring the food and Martin Bajamundi for taking the event photos.

For us, it is always encouraging to see local communities taking up the lead to organize meetups to connect with one another. With a strong community supported by various tech events in Philippines, there is certainly a lot of promise from the Philippines startup scene. Jacob Dehart, cofounder of Threadless also said this: “If you have a strong loyal community, you can do anything.”

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Philippines startup founders meet at Founders Drinks Manila

Earlier last week, PayrollHero, Proudcloud and Kickstart came together to organize Founders Drinks Manila in the Philippines. The event saw more than 50 attendees attending and networking with one another at the PayrollHero office.

Founders Drinks Manila started off with a casual networking session, which was followed by a quick introduction from everyone. During the round of introduction, all the attendees were required to answer three questions in the manner of: ” Who are you? What is your company? What are you looking to get out of tonight?”. The quick round of introductions saw answers ranged from people wanting to talk about the Philippines government, fund raising to just pure wanting to meet fellow founders. Read Jay Fajardo of Proudcloud’s earlier guide to the Philippines startup scene to have a better idea of what’s happening in the country.

Stephen Jagger, one of the cofounders of PayrollHero, also the coorganizer of Founders Drinks Manila, told us that there were no speakers planned on purpose and the event was meant to be a by-invitation only networking event. The event was meant for startup founders who are working on their startups in the Philippines. Some of the startups that were present included Proudcloud, Bolooka, Duets, Collab, FamilyKo, Galleon, Guestlist.ph, Kickstart, Orchestrack, Social Project and Zap.

The event was a huge success and everyone enjoyed the session. The organizers would also like to thank Amazon Web Services for sponsoring the food and Martin Bajamundi for taking the event photos.

For us, it is always encouraging to see local communities taking up the lead to organize meetups to connect with one another. With a strong community supported by various tech events in Philippines, there is certainly a lot of promise from the Philippines startup scene. Jacob Dehart, cofounder of Threadless also said this: “If you have a strong loyal community, you can do anything.”

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Google Japan Summons Doraemon in New TV Commercial

Thanks to @feitclub on Twitter for pointing out this fun new TV commercial from Google Japan, which celebrates everyone’s favorite manga robot cat, Doraemon, on his 100-year ‘reverse’ birthday (he was actually born in the future, on September 3, 2112). It has been in pretty heavy rotation on television all morning here in Japan.

The commercial shows some of the famous tools which Doraemon has made famous over the years, including his ‘Anywhere door ’ or his ‘Bamboo-copter.’

Google Japan has set up MiraiSearch.jp, which encourages smartphone users to download its search app (Android, iOS) and summon Doraemon with a yell via the voice search function. So in effect, you’re calling for Doraemon’s help much like his friend Nobita does in the story.

After that, you can click on the MiraiSearch.jp (sponsored result) and collect a number of fun futuristic tools to put in your own pocket, which is available in the Google Translate app. It’s a really fun way to promote Google’s smartphone voice search, and no doubt there are more than a few people yelling ‘Doraemon’ into their phones this morning. I suspect my neighbors are already very confused…

Check out Google Japan’s new Doraemon commercial below.

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Delhi based online recharge website hacked, two hackers from Indishell group arrested

Noida police have arrested two members of hacker group Indishell (earlier hacked 30 Pakistani government websites) for alleged hacking into website of Memory Electronic Pvt Ltd that specializes in mobile and DTH recharge. According to the police, the accused Sumit Gupta and Ankit Singh, both BTech in computer science have allegedly involved in scores of hacking cases, and the other four accused including Srinivas, who happens to be a founder and president of a cyber security and anti-hacking organization in this case are yet to be arrested [source]

The hacking led company to an estimated loss of more than Rs 50 lakh. Cops arrested hackers after tracking their IP address. According to police, in order to draw off money the hackers would bypass the CCAvenue payment gateway. After hacking into the server, the accused managed administrative rights of the website and when users asked for recharge of their mobile phones, DTH cards, net cards, etc, the hackers would just key in the cell number and the amount to be recharged. However, no bill would be generated as the hackers had bypassed the payment page. Consequently, the recharge company would be debited every time without a bill, causing to losses worth more than Rs 50 lakhs.

This is not the first time when an ecommerce website has been hacked, earlier in February this year; Microsoft India’s online store was hacked by a Chinese group identified as Evil Shadow. In addition to that online travel firm Cleartrip ad server was also hacked in July this year, during Cleartrip’s hack, attackers gained control of the website’s ad system via serving malicious code. Importantly, payment gateway, CCAvenue which hackers apparently have bypassed in this case was hacked in May 2011 by hackers through exploiting SQL injection vulnerability.

Meanwhile, as per Government of India data, cyber crimes including hacking are on the rise in the country. A total of 799 persons were arrested under the Information Technology Act 2000, in the year 2010, which is a significant hike from 288 arrests in 2009, 178 arrests in 2008 and 154 arrests in 2007. Delhi reported the highest number of cyber crimes with 41 cyber crime cases registered in 2010, followed by Bangalore with 40 cases, while Chennai and Mumbai reported 10 and 8 cases respectively.

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Zendesk eyes Southeast Asian expansion

Joel Spolsky said this: “Listen to your customers, not your competitors”, painting out the importance of actively engaging and listening to your customers. David Weekly, founder of PBWorks, highlighted modelling your user in his Three Steps of Epiphany presentation at Echelon 2012.

Zendesk, a leading provider of proven, cloud-based help desk software has an extensive experience in customer service and engagement. To date, they have serviced more than 20,000 customers. Some of its clients include Adobe, MSNBC, Sony, and Groupon.

Zendesk background and product

Zendesk is founded in 2007 in a loft in Denmark by Mikkel Svane (Chief Executive Officer), Morten Primdahl (Chief Technology Officer) and Alexander Aghassipour (Chief Product Officer). The company is also funded by prominent funds such as Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital as well as Matrix Partners.

Zendesk is the fastest way to enable great customer service. Being cloud-based, Zendesk is ready to use as soon as you create an account. Users do not have to worry about servers or software updates. Zendesk is available anywhere, anytime, from PCs to mobile devices. In addition, Zendesk allows organizations to engage customers no matter where and how they want to connect. Zendesk supports multiple customer service channels including voice, the web, email, Twitter, online chat, blogs, community forums, knowledge bases, and more.

Zendesk Integrations

Zendesk integrates with leading business software including Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Atlassian JIRA, Google Analytics, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, GoodData, and 70 more. By integrating with leading analytics, authentication, customer relationship management, e-commerce, and email applications, Zendesk works “right out of the box” with other solutions used to manage the entire customer lifecycle.

Expansion to Southeast Asia

Zendesk has grown over the last few years and it has always enjoyed the support from Asian customers. According to Michael Hansen, VP and MD of APAC Zendesk, Zendesk’s customers in Asia comes primarily from Indonesia, Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, as well as the Philippines. For the Philippines, its customer’s growth has tripled last year. Due to the huge growth in the Asian region, the company is actively seeking to strengthen their foothold here. The company has plans to set up offices in Melbourne, Manila and Singapore to provide more support to its Asian clientele. In Singapore, some of the companies that are using Zendesk includes Singtel, Viki, as well as Splaype

Importance of listening to customer’s feedback

When asked what are the most common problem faced by consumers when they want to feedback about a particular product, Michael shared that most businesses still fail to understand the importance of treating all their customers as businesses. Nowadays, customer wants to be able to reach out to a support representative instantly. Gone are the days where you have to wait for an automated operator to redirect you to the correct support representative. This shift is driven by the rise of social media which provides customers new avenues to voice out their complaints. Hence, businesses have to start listening and engaging their customers through these new channels as well.

Message from Michael Hansen

“Our growth mostly comes from organic growth. This is a huge testimony from our satisfied customers. So do give Zendesk a try. It takes only 15 minutes to truly experience Zendesk and there are no credit card involved.”

Featured Image Credits: Zendesk

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Zendesk eyes Southeast Asian expansion

Joel Spolsky said this: “Listen to your customers, not your competitors”, painting out the importance of actively engaging and listening to your customers. David Weekly, founder of PBWorks, highlighted modelling your user in his Three Steps of Epiphany presentation at Echelon 2012.

Zendesk, a leading provider of proven, cloud-based help desk software has an extensive experience in customer service and engagement. To date, they have serviced more than 20,000 customers. Some of its clients include Adobe, MSNBC, Sony, and Groupon.

Zendesk background and product

Zendesk is founded in 2007 in a loft in Denmark by Mikkel Svane (Chief Executive Officer), Morten Primdahl (Chief Technology Officer) and Alexander Aghassipour (Chief Product Officer). The company is also funded by prominent funds such as Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital as well as Matrix Partners.

Zendesk is the fastest way to enable great customer service. Being cloud-based, Zendesk is ready to use as soon as you create an account. Users do not have to worry about servers or software updates. Zendesk is available anywhere, anytime, from PCs to mobile devices. In addition, Zendesk allows organizations to engage customers no matter where and how they want to connect. Zendesk supports multiple customer service channels including voice, the web, email, Twitter, online chat, blogs, community forums, knowledge bases, and more.

Zendesk Integrations

Zendesk integrates with leading business software including Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Atlassian JIRA, Google Analytics, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, GoodData, and 70 more. By integrating with leading analytics, authentication, customer relationship management, e-commerce, and email applications, Zendesk works “right out of the box” with other solutions used to manage the entire customer lifecycle.

Expansion to Southeast Asia

Zendesk has grown over the last few years and it has always enjoyed the support from Asian customers. According to Michael Hansen, VP and MD of APAC Zendesk, Zendesk’s customers in Asia comes primarily from Indonesia, Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, as well as the Philippines. For the Philippines, its customer’s growth has tripled last year. Due to the huge growth in the Asian region, the company is actively seeking to strengthen their foothold here. The company has plans to set up offices in Melbourne, Manila and Singapore to provide more support to its Asian clientele. In Singapore, some of the companies that are using Zendesk includes Singtel, Viki, as well as Splaype

Importance of listening to customer’s feedback

When asked what are the most common problem faced by consumers when they want to feedback about a particular product, Michael shared that most businesses still fail to understand the importance of treating all their customers as businesses. Nowadays, customer wants to be able to reach out to a support representative instantly. Gone are the days where you have to wait for an automated operator to redirect you to the correct support representative. This shift is driven by the rise of social media which provides customers new avenues to voice out their complaints. Hence, businesses have to start listening and engaging their customers through these new channels as well.

Message from Michael Hansen

“Our growth mostly comes from organic growth. This is a huge testimony from our satisfied customers. So do give Zendesk a try. It takes only 15 minutes to truly experience Zendesk and there are no credit card involved.”

Featured Image Credits: Zendesk

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Baidu Mobile Browser Gets Relaunched, Revamped, Aims to be China’s Number 1 [PICS]

Today at Baidu World, CEO and co-founder of Chinese search giant Baidu, Robin Li, announced a hugely revamped version of its mobile browser, available on Android, Windows Phone 7, and Symbian, both in Chinese and English. This announcement has also practically killed off the rumors that Baidu is considering an acquisition of UCweb, the company behind UC Browser, China’s most widely-used mobile browser at the moment. Clearly, Baidu is thinking that it can beat its rival without a costly acquisition.

But the last time we looked at mobile browsers and their share of web hits in China (to Baidu domains, in fact), UC Browser was the market leader with 30.3 percent share; rival Tencent had 19 percent. Embarrassingly for Baidu, its own earlier effort didn’t even register with a number, so it was clearly failing. That perhaps explains why Baidu is pretty much starting from scratch with this app.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has a PC-based browser which was launched last year. The search giant also has a mobile cloud OS, based on Android. On top of all that, a browser is a good way of keeping people in your own ecosystem. Here are five unique things about Baidu’s relaunched mobile browser:

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1. Look and Feel

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Let’s start with its design. We got a chance to test the browser and I thought the user experience is pretty standard, just like most browsers. It has a grid of icons layout which allows users to bookmark their favorite pages or web apps on the browser homescreen (see the top image). But following this standard isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s pretty easy to tune into and learn how to use it.

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2. T5 Technology = HTML5

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Baidu browser prides itself on its own so-called T5 technology. ‘T’ stands for Taikonaut and ‘5’ stands for HTML5. In laymen’s terms, Baidu claims that T5 provides a faster and better looking browsing experience through its HTML5 optimization conforming to web standards. The company also claims it has the highest HTML5 test score (482) among other mobile browsers (via html5test.com):

(Note: From Html5test.com: “The HTML5 test score is an indication of how well your browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard and related specifications.” Maximum score is 500).

Baidu’s mobile browser with T5 is also WebGL compatible which allows 3D graphics rendering on the the web page canvas itself without the use of any plug-ins. It also supports WebSocket which reduces needless data flow and thus reduces page load times. The Baidu mobile browser also embraces Web Worker which allows long background tasks to load without interrupting the front-end user interface. The new app also comes with a web notification API which allows developers to send notifications just like a native app does. The T5 engine can be switched off but I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that unless it eats up a lot of battery life.

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3. Flash, Games, Apps, Cloud

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Baidu browser isn’t on iOS – so yes, it comes with Adobe Flash support, which will be a relief to developers of Flash-based games. And Baidu ensures that with its T5 technology that comes with WebGL and faster load speeds, developers are able to build better games with better web-standard technologies.

To date, Baidu says that there are over 100,000 web and mobile apps built by third-party developers for its PC browser so far. But the company isn’t able to tell us how many of these 100,000 apps are mobile compatible. Baidu also has a fund to encourage more developers to build apps on its platform. It says that there isn’t a fixed amount to provide to developers and each funding is provided on a case-by-case basis. Developers will also be able to use up to 100GB of Baidu cloud storage to host their apps and databases.

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4. Web App, Native App

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Web app or native app? For the average user, things can get a bit confusing on the new Baidu mobile browser. When you download an app, you can choose to either save it under Baidu mobile browser or to download it as a native app (assuming the developer provided both). Why is Baidu doing this? More later in the day as my thoughts settle on this browser

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5. Search

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Baidu speech based search prompts you for correct search.

The default search engine for Baidu’s mobile browser is — surprise, surprise — Baidu. It doesn’t allow users to change search engines, and I find that a little disappointing. It will be okay for Chinese users since Baidu is preferred here. But for international users, searching on Baidu surely isn’t ideal. Baidu also mentioned that it will give search ranking preference to websites which have mobile sites. Below the URL bar, users can also view trending searches which can be refreshed with a shake of their device. Baidu also allows voice search which is surprisingly quite accurate as I did a couple of search tests with some popular local services, like “Tudou” and, uh, “Qihoo 360.”

All in all, the Baidu mobile browser feels pretty neat now, and finally feels like a powerful tool. I can see it getting a decent share in the already tightly-squeezed Chinese mobile browser space — up against QQ Browser, UCweb, Oupeng (Opera’s specialized browser for China), Maxthon, and many more. The three Chinese-made ones are pushing overseas, and UCweb is already doing well outside of China. But Baidu’s effort is perhaps not quite ready for the international market which generally demands way more mobile browsing options, such as the option to choose Google or Bing for search if you prefer. Yes, that may not necessarily be better in terms of speed or continuity, but surely better for it in the long-run in terms of brand recognition and gaining a share of the mobile browser market.

Get the Baidu Mobile Browser from its homepage.

[UPDATED: Added in that second paragraph shortly after publishing]

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