Pinterest, Facebook, Zynga, Dropbox, AirBnb… What do they all have in common? They’ve all used growth hacking techniques to grow their user base from zero to millions (and sometimes hundreds of millions). Growth Hacking isn’t viral marketing (although viral marketing is part of it). Growth Hacking comes to solve a very common problem in consumer...
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Photo: jangantulalit.com
Indosat recently introduced a new service called Super WiFi. With this service, any of its mobile customers can connect to Indosat owned hotspots without having to manually login to those hotspots. This mechanism is enabled by Indosat’s new sim card technology, EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol).
Currently, Indosat provides no fewer than 700 hotspots in various public spaces in Java and Bali. And the company promises to provide even more hotspots in the future. Detik cites the chief commercial officer of Indosat, Erik Meijer, who explains:
We will continue to develop and enhance the Indosat Super WiFi service. So in a short time, we will expand to big cities elsewhere in Indonesia by adding 30,000 more hotspots. We realized that speedy WiFi services is key in this business.
The new Super-WiFi service will target customers who need a faster, more comfortable internet experience.
For the time being, the service is available for free for all Indosat customers. Although Indosat stated that the free offer is for promotional only, it does not specify when that promotion will be over. With access speed of up to 2 Mbps and unlimited data cap, the offer is pretty good for most Indonesians.
For more information on how the service works, you can check out the video walk-through below (in Bahasa Indonesia).
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Singapore based startup PlayMoolah has partnered with OCBC Bank in an initiative to provide account holders withaccess to the subscription-based online game platform. PlayMoolah is a platform designed to teach financial literacy to children aged between six and twelve years with gamification tools that encourage children take charge of their money, in a fun, engaging...
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Singapore based startup PlayMoolah has partnered with OCBC Bank in an initiative to provide account holders withaccess to the subscription-based online game platform. PlayMoolah is a platform designed to teach financial literacy to children aged between six and twelve years with gamification tools that encourage children take charge of their money, in a fun, engaging...
The post PlayMoolah partners with OCBC Bank to teach financial literacy to children appeared first on e27.
The RIAJ supports this new law
As many of you know, Japan’s revised copyright law, which was approved back on June 15 by House of Representatives (without much discussion), goes into effect today [1].
As we noted back in June, the new law brings with it criminal punishment which could be a prison sentence of two years or less, or a fine of up to 2 million yen (almost $25,000) for anyone who knowingly downloads copyrighted material.
And while there have already been laws in place to dissuade uploaders of copyrighted content (maximum of 10 years in prison, up to 10 million yen), piracy is still common. It will be interesting to see how aggressively this new law is enforced. After all, the damage caused by an individual download (as opposed to an upload or share) is pretty minimal. But given that anti-file sharing laws haven’t been working as well as Japan’s entertainment industry had hoped, criminalizing downloads is their new plan.
Are we about to see a wave of individual citizens going to jail or fined in Japan for copyright infringement? Will they serve as an example to persuade Japanese citizens that downloading will be seriously punished? If the law hinges on the offender being ‘aware’ that their download is illegal, it will be interesting to see the first cases that emerge, and exactly how this awareness is proven.
If the goal is indeed to dissuade people from downloading, Japan’s entertainment industry might also consider improving and innovating its methods of digital distribution. I suspect that we’ll see less action on that front though, and far more in the courtrooms.
This Mainichi report is no longer online, but here is a cached version. It discusses some details about how the bill was approved. ↩
The post Japan’s New Anti-Download Law Starts Today appeared first on Tech in Asia.
eBay International AG need not pay tax on profits earned from India operations, the Mumbai Income-Tax Appellate Tribunal has ruled.
The tribunal ruled that the fees received from customers for use of an online platform cannot be characterised as fees for technical services (FTS) under income-tax law. Such fees are in the nature of ‘business profits’, it said.
The tribunal concluded that eBay International had no permanent establishment (PE) in India and, therefore, the ‘business profits’ earned here were not taxable. [source]
Software sector to gain from Nokia tax case ruling
The High Court ruled in a case of Nokia Networks that payment for software would not qualify as ‘royalty’ under the India-Finland Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA).
Nokia had entered into agreement for supply of GSM equipment with a few Indian cellular operators. [source]
Robin Li at Stanford, photo: electricnicolas.com
Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) CEO and founder, Robin Li was at Stanford University last week for the China 2.0 conference. In his speech, he shared a little about Baidu’s take on mobile. Li said that Baidu will invest 25 percent of its research fund in mobile, and will be expecting three times more revenue this year compared to 2011.
Li admits that he doesn’t exactly know how mobile will bring in revenue but he did remark that Baidu isn’t expecting to see immediate returns.
Baidu has had several mobile products ranging from its mobile browser, to its photo app, to map apps. It has also recently pushed out a major update on its browser to include what it calls “T5 technology.” It also made an effort to capitalize on Apple’s recent iOS 6 map woes bringing features like discount vouchers, indoor guides for malls, and real time traffic.
Baidu was recently included on Forbes’ 100 Most In Innovative Companies’s list.
Also see: How Mobile is Now Part of Baidu’s Revenue Equation
[Source tech.sina.com, photo: electricnicolas.com]
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RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM) is finally set to launch its BlackBerry Innovation Center at the Bandung Institute of Technology (aka Institut Teknologi Bandung, or ITB) this Friday, October 4th. The news is much anticipated, especially after RIM announced in the previous month that it would give scholarships to 30 ITB students. The agreement between RIM and ITB itself was signed on March 3rd, 2012.
On its official website, RIM states that Indonesia is one of its most promising markets. And given that Indonesia is one of the few places where RIM is still pretty popular, it’s not surprising that its first innovation center in Asia would be built in Indonesia.
The innovation center will mainly serve as a training center for students who wish to develop and market mobile apps. In addition, the center will also occasionally hold events to stimulate innovations in app development and entrepreneurship such as seminars and conferences. RIM also hopes this program will be able to bridge to other universities in Indonesia as part of its BlackBerry Academic Program.
You can watch the video below for a sneak preview of what the BlackBerry Innovation Center will look like:
The post RIM to Launch BlackBerry Innovation Center in ITB appeared first on Tech in Asia.
A week before most of China took some time off for some extended public holidays, it felt as if the Chinese tech scene was trying to cram everything into the past seven days instead. So grab some well-deserved Sunday coffee and then get to grips with all this:
China’s hottest social network, Sina Weibo, rolls out new features at the kind of speed that’d make Twitter’s founders have nose-bleeds. And so Weibo started out the week by launching personalized QR codes to make it easier for users to share their profiles.
We know you folks love infographics – and this one is especially neat as it’s a great primer on how the messaging app WeChat is (surprisingly) emerging as a new must-do channel for social marketing in China.
Sticking with social, we noticed some very dodgy-sounding numbers about Facebook and Twitter users in China, and decided to stay away from them. In the end, it proved to be an object lesson in the dangers of extrapolation – and the importance of fact-checking the fact-collators.
From time to time, it’s good to take a step back and look at the big picture. And this is a pretty huge one.
…And if we look into the near-future of the mobile web in China, we can see that drastically different demographics will make it a monetization nightmare.
The Chinese internet, close to being an intranet, can’t get any worse, can it? Well, it turns out it can, and it has.
While this was apparently not related to working conditions on the Foxconn factory floor, it was nonetheless somewhat disturbing to see an incident of this scale, reportedly requiring hundreds of riot police to quell the violent outbursts.
In finance news, the miserable year for Chinese stocks got a brief respite when the massive game developer CMGE debuted on the NASDAQ – the first there this year, and only the second from China to make a US IPO all year.
To end on a cheery note, the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio Mobile, schooled everyone in how to do some fun and memorable street-level marketing ahead of the launch of its new title, Bad Piggies.
That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.
The post 9 Must-Read Tech Stories in China This Week appeared first on Tech in Asia.
In search of a dream: When India won independence 65 years ago, its leaders had a vision for the country’s future. In part, their dream was admirable and rare for Asia: liberal democracy. Thanks to them, Indians mostly enjoy the freedom to protest, speak up, vote, travel and pray however and wherever they want to; and those liberties have ensured that elected civilians, not generals, spies, religious leaders or self-selecting partymen, are in charge. If only their counterparts in China, Russia, Pakistan and beyond could say the same. Read the full column here.
Back to reforms: It had been a brutal August for the Congress party: economic growth was wilting, the monsoon rains were failing and the opposition had it cornered on yet another corruption scandal. Read how Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, was persuaded to back reforms.
This is very clever: the NotFound project, a collaborative initiative from Missing Children Europe and Child Focus, wants to raise awareness for missing and sexually exploited children in Europe by asking participating website publishers turn their 404 error page real estate into notices. Full story here.
IFTTT: San Francisco Startup Lets Anyone Control The Internet of Things: To get to the office of one of San Francisco’s most innovative startups, you need to walk away from the gleaming promise of the financial district and toward the boarded-up failures of upper Market Street. You’ll be looking for a formerly abandoned building, and you’ll likely walk past the entrance a few times before you try a blank steel door next to a shuttered storefront.
Power, Pollution and the Internet: Jeff Rothschild’s machines at Facebook had a problem he knew he had to solve immediately. They were about to melt. The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components. Read how they solved the crisis and more on power, pollution and the Internet.
How to find porn online? Stuart Lawley has chosen a strange mission for his company, ICM Registry: helping you find pornography online. Is this something for which sentient human beings require assistance? Do we need to say- read more here?
Who spends $52 mn for a website? Meet the Chinese: China’s Ministry of Railways (MOR) recently revamped its 12306.cn website for buying train tickets, but the project has widely been regarded as a colossal failure. That failure didn’t come cheap, either, as the government is said to have spent RMB 330 million ($52 million) developing the website. Read more here.
Facebook, Twitter Growth in China Has Lots of Caveats: A new report shows just how porous China’s infamous Great Firewall might be for local Internet users determined to access banned websites. The country’s censors have deemed Facebook (FB) and Twitter unfit for local viewing, but that hasn’t stopped millions of Chinese from using the social-networking services, according to London-based researcher GlobalWebIndex. Read the full story here.
A Close Reading of Two Apple Apologies : The announcement from Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, in which he addressed dissatisfaction with Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6, is not the first time Apple (AAPL) has apologized to its customers. The company gave free cases or rebates to iPhone customers during the “Antennagate” glitch in 2010 and issued $100 rebates to customers who bought the first iPhones in the summer of 2007, before Apple dropped the price by $200 only two months later, in September. Bloomberg Businessweek takes a close look at the two apologies.
A new way to go to jail: Man straps self with wires and gadgets, surprised to be arrested: A Georgia man claims all the gadgets and wires around his body are a style statement. He is arrested after people in a mall are alarmed. Read the full story.
Foxconn Plant Closed After Riot, Company Says: Foxconn Technology, a major supplier to some of the world’s electronics giants, including Apple, said it had closed one of its large Chinese plants Monday after the police were called in to break up a fight among factory employees. More here
‘AOL squatter‘ takes wraps off new startup, Claco: Remember the guy who lived off AOL to bootstrap his startup and was finally shown the door by the campus security? He’s launching his new startup. Find out more.
“Oh Kickstarter, is there anything you can’t do?”: Apparently not, given the supremely exciting level of participation in the Kickstarter effort for the LIFX, a WiFi-enabled, multi-colored, energy-efficient LED light bulb that you can control with your iPhone or Android phone. Read more about how the creators of the project raised more than a million dollars with 51 days to go. Read full story here.
32 Business and Life Lessons: An entrepreneurs personal story of how he went from having a job he did not like at all, not knowing what to do with his life to building several successful businesses. Read More.
You Can’t Be Half An Entrepreneur: I’m a big fan of the HBO show Boardwalk Empire. One of the famous quotes from the show is “You can’t be half a gangster.” That line was said by one character urging the other to start acting like a full gangster and use all the tools at his disposal (violence) to resolve issues in their illegal endeavors; otherwise they’ll both probably end up on the wrong side of a gun barrel, since their competitors will be acting like “full gangsters”. Writes Jai Bhatti in Business Insider.
Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More? I think I’ve read Paul Graham’s post on “Startup = Growth” three or four times now. And of course on Twitter I’ve seen the Tweets, ReTweets and superlatives on what a great post it is. Read more here.
Python 3.3.0 final release is out. This version includes a range of improvements of the 3.x series. Read more to know the major new features and changes in the 3.3 release.
Visualising data: Data visualisation enables us to learn from information. Jo Wood, a professor of visual analytics at City University London, found a terrific way to depict a vast amount of data in a neatly accessible way—plotting all the bicycle journeys taken by London’s municipal bike-sharing service in the first year of operation in 2010-11; some five million trips. The result is the magnificent video-graphic below. Read more here.
For the future of big data startups, look to Facebook: Facebook knows something about big data — it collects more data and has built more tools than almost anybody else. Here, Facebook’s Jay Parikh and Accel Partners’ Ping Li talk about what lessons big data startups can take from Facebook to build businesses that can succeed. Read the full story here.
Wireless Stadiums: The Next Best Thing to Not Being There: On Sunday, Sept. 16, the New England Patriots played their home opener at Gillette Stadium against the Arizona Cardinals, a team they were expected to rout. They did not. For the first three quarters, the home team’s offense bogged down, its running backs gobbled up by the Cardinal defense, its offensive line porous, its receivers unable to get open or to catch the ball when they did. Read here.
A conversation with: Tinkle Magazine Editor Rajani Thindiath: Tinkle, India’s first English-language comic book for children, published its 600th issue last month. Read more about this iconic comic with which most Indian children grew up.
Did a bug in Deep Blue lead to Kasparov’s defeat? In his new book, Nate Silver writes that a glitch in IBM’s chess terminator may have spooked Garry Kasparov in his famous 1997 loss. But he was more likely psyched out by its surprising brilliance. Read the full story.