Faunia Rancher: The INAICTA Winner Who Knows How to Raise a Monster

Photo: itunes.apple.com

This is not an ordinary ranch. Faunia Rancher is a game that’ll take you on a journey full of fairies and monsters. But the gremlins are actually cute. You can even meet an Indonesian monster called Barong in its traditional Balinese house. For this mythological journey, Chowdown Games and Joyverter Entertainment worked together as ‘Art on Code’ and this weekend won the INAICTA 2012 awards in the games category.

The idea is simple: raise these adorable little monsters and take them on a journey to win crystals so that you can create more virtual gnarly creatures. But its story is what makes it interesting. As a rancher, you will have to raise a unique fantasy creature called “Faunia”.

The way you raise the Faunia makes it like a Tamagochi-style game. You will have to feed them, clean their habitat, participate in regular activities, and treat them when they’re sick. As the Faunia grows, it will give you eggs that can be sold. There are some fun “mini games” bundled in too.

Faunia Rancher was developed by Ronald Widjaja, Erick Theodorus, Burhan Dewantara, Robert Tan, Robin Tjungestu, and Felix Jingga. Even though it has Barong as its Indonesian mascot, this game was intended for the international market. Ronald explains:

We’re open to all kinds of monsters, from Barong to Frankenstein. We also have a collaborations for other characters, such as with Animonster [Indonesia’s anime and lifestyle magazine] and Vandaria [a card game from ZIGMA magazine]. Although it’s for the international market, we will continue to develop local mascots like from the Indonesian comic Garudayana.

To keep the developers’ kitchen steaming, this iOS game has in-app purchases for every gimmick in the game. You can buy food, medicine, and even crystal shards to speed up the growth of new Faunias for around $1 to $5 each. Without major promotion, Faunia Rancher have 10,000 players in its first five months, and sells 10 different kinds of virtual coins every day. Now they are targeting the global market with the help from ‘Free App a Day’ as one marketing strategy.

To build the community, Faunia Rancher has its own actual merchandise. More than 2,000 gamers on the Faunia Rancher Facebook page have participated in a design competition for new characters and various kinds of fan art.

Grab the free Faunia Rancher game in the iTunes App Store.

The post Faunia Rancher: The INAICTA Winner Who Knows How to Raise a Monster appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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Faunia Rancher: The INAICTA Winner Who Knows How to Raise a Monster

Photo: itunes.apple.com

This is not an ordinary ranch. Faunia Rancher is a game that’ll take you on a journey full of fairies and monsters. But the gremlins are actually cute. You can even meet an Indonesian monster called Barong in its traditional Balinese house. For this mythological journey, Chowdown Games and Joyverter Entertainment worked together as ‘Art on Code’ and this weekend won the INAICTA 2012 awards in the games category.

The idea is simple: raise these adorable little monsters and take them on a journey to win crystals so that you can create more virtual gnarly creatures. But its story is what makes it interesting. As a rancher, you will have to raise a unique fantasy creature called “Faunia”.

The way you raise the Faunia makes it like a Tamagochi-style game. You will have to feed them, clean their habitat, participate in regular activities, and treat them when they’re sick. As the Faunia grows, it will give you eggs that can be sold. There are some fun “mini games” bundled in too.

Faunia Rancher was developed by Ronald Widjaja, Erick Theodorus, Burhan Dewantara, Robert Tan, Robin Tjungestu, and Felix Jingga. Even though it has Barong as its Indonesian mascot, this game was intended for the international market. Ronald explains:

We’re open to all kinds of monsters, from Barong to Frankenstein. We also have a collaborations for other characters, such as with Animonster [Indonesia’s anime and lifestyle magazine] and Vandaria [a card game from ZIGMA magazine]. Although it’s for the international market, we will continue to develop local mascots like from the Indonesian comic Garudayana.

To keep the developers’ kitchen steaming, this iOS game has in-app purchases for every gimmick in the game. You can buy food, medicine, and even crystal shards to speed up the growth of new Faunias for around $1 to $5 each. Without major promotion, Faunia Rancher have 10,000 players in its first five months, and sells 10 different kinds of virtual coins every day. Now they are targeting the global market with the help from ‘Free App a Day’ as one marketing strategy.

To build the community, Faunia Rancher has its own actual merchandise. More than 2,000 gamers on the Faunia Rancher Facebook page have participated in a design competition for new characters and various kinds of fan art.

Grab the free Faunia Rancher game in the iTunes App Store.

The post Faunia Rancher: The INAICTA Winner Who Knows How to Raise a Monster appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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Why organizations should consciously segregate Reporting and Analytics

In my last article, I spoke about the need to view Analytics in a simplified, yet larger sense. Many organizations that I have spoken to, especially those that are growing / evolving, already claim to have an analytics functions. Which is why, I find it necessary to insist on a particular delineation – Separate Reporting and Analytics.

Sacrilege, you say?! 2 sides of the same coin, I hear!!

Well, the simple reason is that founders / management can then start differentiating Analytics from Technology. Let me explain.  Infact, treat this as an appeal from someone who has been an external Analytics service provider as well as built the BI and Analytics functions within organizations!

For the many organizations who claim to have an analytics function, my one question would be – Does the Analytics team fall under the CTO? That is because Analytics is often synonymous with Reports. This is great, because the natural progression for analytics maturity in organizations is to first put in place systems to start collecting data, and then move on to creating Business Intelligence frameworks to help structure this data and report ahead. Unfortunately, and this is something I have even observed directly in some very high profile funded companies in India today, this is where the slip happens at 2 levels,

a) Analytics begins to get treated as Reports++. It over time thus gets entrenched as a part of the BI (and consequently the CTO’s) team;

b) Analytics teams begins to be treated as an extension of technology and not as an extension of business teams.

Net result.. Analytics becomes disconnected from direct business involvement and decision making. And that is NOT analytics.

Probe the many companies that claim to have an analytics function, and one will find essentially a reporting team that at times additionally compiles numbers for the management. Hence the need to differentiate Reporting (process of collating and sharing data with the organization) and Analytics (structured analysis of this data).

As an example, at my current abode- hoopos (a babycare focused ecommerce firm), the Analytics team works with the engineering team to create relevant data views and reports quickly. The engineering team has in turn created a dedicated portal that every single business manager has access to with real time generation of relevant reports. Hence, while the Analytics team works closely with the technology team to create the right data metrics and views, its primary internal client is the business team. The Analytics team thus works with the line managers to solve business problems ranging from online marketing spends optimization, achieving logistics efficiencies to Targeted marketing and even product catalog recommendations!

To sum up, Analytics should work with the engineering team to help each line manager get access to tools to Analyze their performance themselves. However, management should avoid subsuming them within engineering itself!

What are your thoughts?

[About the author: Sudarshan Gangrade leads the Analytics and Digital marketing work at Hoopos.com, a babycare focused Ecommerce firm.  Sudarshan has a wide breadth of experience in the Analytics industry - from creating an analytics practise from scratch within an organization to providing analytics consulting to Fortune 100 Global FMCG majors. Before hoopos, Sudarshan worked for 2 years with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). He anchored the creation and running of the Analytics and Reporting backbone for UIDAI and earlier worked for Marketics. Sudarshan is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Bangalore.]

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Baidu’s Digital Patriotism Looks Like Corporate Suicide for Overseas Expansion Plans

The disputed islands as they appear now on baodiao.baidu.com, a special Baidu page for pinning a flag on the rocky outposts.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s biggest search engine, has engaged in a surprising bit of digital activism and patriotism, declaring that the islands disputed by both China and Japan (aka: Diaoyu/Senkaku) belong to China. To back this up, as spotted by Shanghaiist (via TNW), Baidu has three things: a Diaoyu Islands doodle on its Baidu.com homepage, a special portal for planting virtual Chinese flags on the rocky outpost (pictured above), and a giant flag atop the claimed territory within Baidu Maps.

But we can’t help but thinking that this is corporate suicide when it comes to Baidu’s overseas expansion plans – especially in Southeast Asia. Baidu already has operations in Japan, and unsurprisingly its Baidu.jp homepage [1] lacks a special doodle of this kind. But Baidu has even bigger ambitions for the Southeast Asia region, and today’s acts of patriotism and partisanship will have likely damaged massively the company’s chances – particularly for its recent ventures into Vietnam. Indeed, those tentative steps into Vietnam have already met with a backlash, since Vietnam and China have a separate territorial dispute over some different islands.

Baidu’s patriotism might play very well at home [2], but surely the search giant is now utterly toxic in the rest of the region. We’ve questioned Baidu HQ in Beijing on this specific issue, and will update if they can respond.

Baidu set up a research lab in Singapore this summer that’ll be a R&D base for research into Thai and Vietnamese languages and their application in semantic search. It’s a bold and very methodical expansion plan, showing that Baidu wants to do it right, and give Asia a credible challenger to Google. But all that investment risks being thrown away if Baidu’s actions at home make it a pariah among other nation’s web users.

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1. Baidu Japan has always struggled, and has posted over $100 million in losses since 2008.  ↩

2. Baidu’s explains its special features as a way “to encourage people to be rational in their expressions of patriotism, to renounce violence and other forms of extremism. Planting a digital flag to express your feelings on the matter of the Diaoyu Islands is a much better alternative to throwing rocks or smashing cars.”  ↩

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Find Unique Travel Experiences With Local Guides Using Meetrip

While traveling can be lots of fun, some aspects of it can be quite mundane. Buying guide books and looking up “popular restaurants” using Google – we all end up going to the same places. The rise of Airbnb is a clear sign that people are looking for more in their trips. And a startup from Japan plans to tackle this travel sharing market with a new product called Meetrip.

Meetrip is a smartphone app (pictured below) that connects local users (or guides) with travelers. After signing up using Facebook credentials, local guides can quickly and easily create their own tour plans. For example, a three-hour tour to explore an old town not known to tourists, or a long lunch hour to enjoy the best hot noodles in town. Travelers can find interesting tours and sign up for them. By communicating back and forth with the guide, together you can come up with a perfect tour just for you. The details of the tour including the price can be revised afterwards, leaving space for adjustments.

The idea of Meetrip came from co-founder Takashi Kiyama who is a frequent traveler. Of all the trips he has ever taken, he explains that the ones that he remembers the most are those where he met someone local and communicated with them. And that’s why Meetrip focuses on people rather than plans. The team founded the company in June 2011, and has been working on the product for four months. They released a prototype in Taipei, Taiwan, and conducted beta user interviews to enhance the user experience.

The motivation for locals to use Meetrip can be many things, including interacting with travelers from distant places, speaking/practicing foreign languages, or explaining a special place in your area to travelers. These are the initial reasons why locals begin using the app; but with time, Meetrip can become a significant source of income for them. For this reason, the team is focused on bringing their travel product to Asian countries first. Meetrip can be used in Tokyo and Taipei for now, but there are plans to expand to Seoul, Jakarta, and Bangkok within the next few months. The startup’s goal is to release Meetrip in more than 10 countries this year.

The company behind Meetrip is Duckdive. The other co-founder is Nobuhiro Ariyoshi. As a university student, he founded and sold his first company to Net Age Group. His second startup was a C2C market place named Cyta.jp. The CTO of Duckdive is Shinya Sasatani, who while working as CTO for another company released a very popular iPhone app called Pocket Guitar. The paid app has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. They are all graduates of Keio university.

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Travelogy secures S$250,000 in funding from Crystal Horse Investments

Singapore-based incubator Crystal Horse Investments has just invested S$250,000 in Travelogy through the i.Jam funding scheme by MDA.

The post Travelogy secures S$250,000 in funding from Crystal Horse Investments appeared first on e27.

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The lowdown on showcase pitches at Myojo Waraku

With more than 3,000 people attending the festival of the tech and creative at Fukuoka, Japan, sessions at Myojo Waraku included keynote speeches by the city’s mayor and angel investor Taizo Son, panel talks with celebrities and venture capitalists and showcase pitches of 10 startups from Japan and Asia. Out of the 10 startups, seven were...

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GREE Acquires Another US-based Mobile Games Developer

Japanese social gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) has announced today that it has acquired San Francisco-based mobile game company App Ant.

App Ant is the game developer behind Dino Life, which GREE launched back in May as the first Android title for its North American studio. The metrics for that game so far appear less than stellar [1]. A wise friend recently pointed out to me that the game did launch on iOS in Canada, but has yet to launch on iOS elsewhere – ostensibly after not testing as well as expected. You can see the app metrics for the Canada app store below.

But GREE likes what it sees from App Ant, whose members will now join the Japan-based company at its San Francisco studio. GREE International’s CEO Naoki Aoyagi noted:

[App Ant has] continually impressed us with the quality of its engineering, art, and overall product. They share the same strong passion GREE has for mobile social gaming and we genuinely respect their dedication to evolving the gaming industry. […] With our constantly growing and evolving mobile game market, having such exceptional talent on board to build great experiences for the latest hardware is a huge priority for us.

We’re not certain what the terms of this acquisition were, but its not the first time for GREE to splash some money on picking up a US-based game developer. Readers will likely remember when the company spent the huge sum of $210 million for Funzio earlier this year, also based in San Francisco.

Dino Life, Canada iOS app store, from AppAnnie.com

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1. Check it out over on App Annie, login required.  ↩

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Nivaata’s Verayu Helps You Locate Without GPS [Location as a Service]

If you own a smartphone, you are likely to be aware of location-based services. Most apps today provide you information based on where are you at the time of requesting that piece of info, be it about choosing an Italian restaurant in your vicinity or finding your way through an unknown one-way in your city that you entered to avoid traffic, or serving you targeted ads. Most of these applications work based on knowing the users’ location, but what if you want to find out locations of others?

Bangalore-based Nivaata has launched Verayu, a solution that works without a GPS device, and lets you track locations of your taxis, transport trucks, or delivery boys, or even your buddies, if they permit you to do so. It also provides a cloud based LBS platform API offering that helps enterprises to easily integrate location intelligence into their business processes and systems. The system provides an on-demand, non-intrusive, permissions-based location tracking and sharing platform that has no impact on battery life. It is focused specifically on the “where-are-you” problem, as opposed to the “where-am-i” problem solved by most other location-based services.

Currently the system is suitable for B2B companies, who sign up with Verayu for various solutions like mSFA, mCRM, Transport Management, and logistics. The tracking can be done either through a pre-configured mobile phone, or a proprietary device called Yantra. A fixed fee per trackee per month is charged for services, and queries/alerts (SMS and IVR alerts) are based on volume.

How does it work?

Verayu is a strictly push based, no-checkin based system (though checking-in is an option to confirm one’s location with relation to a PoI). It can work on pretty much any phone, from the high-end Android Jelly Bean toting Galaxies to small feature phones with no GPS/GPRS. Provided all necessary permissions have been set up, it is possible to ping the phone remotely and non-intrusively by the tracker, through one-click on the browser, one SMS, one call to the IVR, or one touch on Verayu tracker app available for J2ME, Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, or iOS.

Verayu

Since the service has to be set up with respect to cell towers, an initial “city seed scan” is done in every new city that scans all the cell towers in the city that takes 5-15 days in their own internal coordinates. Post-deployment, the database grows by self-learning.

The underlying technology
Determining whether a cell-phone is moving or not, simply by using available cell tower information on the mobile itself (without GPS hardware requirement), is the core of the technology behind Verayu. When the client app detects phone movement of sufficient distance, it starts conveying information (location packets) at a programmed interval to the Verayu server, where the current location is recorded and path tracing is done using “Path Adaptive Cell Clustering Technology” (PACCT) on the cloud using available info from that region’s ‘profile’. When the client app understands it is stationary, it simply throttles down the update frequency (as programmed), and the server renders the location using nearby PoI’s, which is again based on user profiling as opposed to the region’s profile.

So, the system can have two states:

• Idling (no-trip state): responds to ping requests from server (push in, GPRS/SMS reply, back to idle, no continuous updates), absolutely no battery or bandwidth impact.
• Active Tracking (trip mode): detect motion / speed using cell-tower info only, auto switch On/Off GPS if GPS hardware available, throttle up/down location update frequency.

The mobile state machine is remotely controlled through cloud API; the client app does not have any user interface, it strictly syncs with server’s state machine across reboots.

Sriram Kannan, the founder of Nivaata, and the man behind the technology, has filed a patent on PACCT in India, and also a PCT application for the rest of the world. There are a few more patents in the pipeline, which he did not disclose as of now. “There are quite a few challenges to cell-tower based tracking accuracy, but we’ve found out that a lot can be done by profiling the cell-tower arrangement in a city. On the technology front, I feel we’ve just started scratching the surface. We have been able to implement only a part of our IP/ ideas, and the results tend to get far better as we continue with our efforts, and also with more and more user additions to the system”, mentions Sriram.

Not only you, also me
Verayu, a distortion of “where-are-you”, also provides “where-am-i” [Verami?] type of services, for specific use cases in B2B. For example, finding nearby customers, taking geotagged pictures, setting up location based reminders, etc. Rolling out B2C applications for self-location is in the pipeline. More than just SMS/ Voice, Verayu will have an app with a user-interface for where-am-I applications.

API and developer tools
Verayu aims to provide a Location-as-a-Service (Laas) by means of a Verayu Locations-on-Demand (LoD) a very powerful, simple to use REST API. Once Verayu client is installed on the mobile phone to be tracked, retrieving the location of the mobile phone is as simple as calling a URL specifying the mobile number. Verayu LoD API is currently in private beta, and you can be a part of the beta program by contacting :contactus@nivaata.com.

Led by Sriram Kannan, Nivaata is a team of 8 people, and have raised four rounds of angel funding totalling $250K, and a confirmed (but undisclosed) round of institutional funding.

On being asked about relations with carriers, Sriram replies

“We do not have to partner with wireless carriers, as we control the full chain end-to-end, but we have operators using our system (and paying) for their own internal use (sales force automation). We also have a few strategic wireless carrier partnerships, to roll out the platform for a few key verticals, that are infeasible to cater to as a startup. We have already partnered with RIM (we are their preferred service partner for LBS solutions in India), as well as a partnership brewing with other OEM’s as we speak.”

With the Government enforcing telecom operators to track location with 95% accuracy, products like Verayu have an easier means of implementation and will provide more accurate results. LBS and LaaS are yet to grow big in India, companies like Nivaata and products like Verayu are laying the foundation stones. What do you think? Does Verayu have a fair chance? Shoot out your opinions in the comments section below.

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