Launchgarage has announced its initial set of supported startups. The pioneer batch has kicked off, with four tech startup teams receiving funding, support and mentorship. Launchgarage launched its pioneer call for startups last September with the aim of guiding startups through the idea, build and launch stages. The so-called Garageheads are to go through a...
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Launchgarage has announced its initial set of supported startups. The pioneer batch has kicked off, with four tech startup teams receiving funding, support and mentorship. Launchgarage launched its pioneer call for startups last September with the aim of guiding startups through the idea, build and launch stages. The so-called Garageheads are to go through a...
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Professional network LinkedIn on Wednesday launched the new version of “LinkedIn for BlackBerry app,” for BB6 and BB7 users.
The app will be available in Hindi along with seven other languages such as German, Spanish and French, the company said in a statement.
The new app has the following new functions
Getting a grip on mobile users in emerging economies like India has become a major focus for large tech companies like Facebook, Linkedin and Google. The country has over 900 million mobile phone subscriptions. Earlier this month, Facebook silently launched its Talktime program in India to sign up more mobile users. Through the program, you could get $ 1 phone credit for every referral.
Google, on the other hand, has been improving its mobile presence with successive launches. The company started offering free text messaging to Google mail users and also launched turn by turn navigation with live traffic information for Google maps, a product heavily used on smartphones.
This mobile- local-language push comes with a growing realization at tech companies that while India has over 100 million Internet users, the next 100 million users will be using mobile devices and also more comfortable in local languages. With growth slowing down in mature markets, large tech companies are also forced to look outside the United States and UK for growth.
What will drive the technology trends for 2013? Analyst firm, Gartner shares their prediction:
Mobile Device Battles
By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide and that by 2015 over 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones. However, only 20 percent of those handsets are likely to be Windows phones. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google’s Android and Apple iOS operating systems.
Windows 8 is Microsoft’s big bet and Windows 8 platform styles should be evaluated to get a better idea of how they might perform in real-world environments as well as how users will respond. Consumerization will mean enterprises won’t be able to force users to give up their iPads or prevent the use of Windows 8 to the extent consumers adopt consumer targeted Windows 8 devices.
Mobile Applications and HTML5
For the next few years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile application so expect to employ several. Six mobile architectures – native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain popular. However, there will be a long term shift away from native apps to Web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable. Nevertheless, native apps won’t disappear, and will always offer the best user experiences and most sophisticated features. Developers will also need to develop new design skills to deliver touch-optimized mobile applications that operate across a range of devices in a coordinated fashion.
Personal Cloud
The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals keep their personal content, access their services and personal preferences and center their digital lives. It will be the glue that connects the web of devices they choose to use during different aspects of their daily lives. The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of their computing and communication activities.
Enterprise App Stores
Enterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps forcing the enterprise to deal with multiple stores, multiple payment processes and multiple sets of licensing terms. Many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores. With enterprise app stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs.
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as physical items such as consumer devices and physical assets are connected to the Internet. Key elements of the IoT which are being embedded in a variety of mobile devices include embedded sensors, image recognition technologies and NFC payment.
Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
As staffs have been asked to do more with less, IT departments must play multiple roles in coordinating IT-related activities, and cloud computing is now pushing that change to another level. Internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role is emerging as IT organizations realize that they have a responsibility to help improve the provisioning and consumption of inherently distributed, heterogeneous and often complex cloud services for their internal users and external business partners.
Strategic Big Data
Big Data is moving from a focus on individual projects to an influence on enterprises’ strategic information architecture. Dealing with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional approaches. This realization is leading organizations to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions.
Actionable Analytics
Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. With the improvement of performance and costs, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. The mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data repositories potentially enables use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time. This new step provides simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.
In Memory Computing
In memory computing (IMC) can also provide transformational opportunities. The execution of certain-types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds allowing these processes to be provided in the form of real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services. Millions of events can be scanned in a matter of a few tens of millisecond to detect correlations and patterns pointing at emerging opportunities and threats “as things happen.” The possibility of concurrently running transactional and analytical applications against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business innovation. Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use.
Integrated Ecosystems
The market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems and away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches. Driving this trend is the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and more assured security. Driving the trend for vendors the ability to have more control of the solution stack and obtain greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment, but without the need to provide any actual hardware.
Cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages facilitate purchase, consumption and/or use of capabilities from multiple vendors and may provide a foundation for ISV development and application runtime. In the mobile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive varying degrees of control across and end-to-end ecosystem extending the client through the apps.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has finally issued an announcement that the Kindle is at last coming to Japan, as well as the Kindle store with 50,000 Japanese titles. The breakdown of the Kindle models for Japan, which can be pre-ordered today, will be as follows:
| Model | Price | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Kindle Paperwhite Wifi | 8480 yen ($106) | November 19th |
| Kindle Paperwhite 3G | 12,980 yen ($162) | week of December 2nd |
| Kindle Fire | 12,800 yen ($160) | December 19 |
| Kindle Fire HD 16GB | 15,800 yen ($198) | December 19 |
| Kindle Fire HD 32GB | 19,800 yen ($248) | December 19 |
This comes after a very, very long delay and perpetual reports that Amazon and its Kindle would be coming soon. That was likely due to reservations on the part of publishers, as Amazon has the potential to disrupt what was a reportedly a $789 million industry for fiscal 2011. Amazon adds in its announcement:
The 50,000 Japanese-language titles come from a wide range of publishers small and large, including Bungeishunju, Gentosha, Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shinchosha, Shogakukan and Shueisha, all of whom have worked with Amazon to make their titles available in the Kindle Store.
It has been almost five years since Amazon’s Kindle was originally released, so this has certainly been a long time coming. We’ll have to wait and see how it stacks up against Rakuten’s Kobo, which got an early jump on the local market, despite a few minor troubles along the way.
The post Amazon’s Kindle Finally Coming to Japan, Pre-orders Available Now appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Husk Power systems, started by University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business students converts rice husks into energy and has created proprietary technology that cost-effectively converts rice husks into electricity.
The startup earlier won $250K seed funding from DFJ/Cisco; and later raised funding from Shell foundation (in 2009). The company has now raised $5mn in equity funding to augment its expansion plans (source/via).
Rice husks (the casing on the outside of rice grains) have traditionally been discarded. However, upon heating, rice husk releases gas and which Husk Power systems (HPS) uses to run modified diesel engines to generate electricity. The waste product of the process is high in silica and can be sold to concrete manufacturers.
HPS provides end-to-end renewable energy solutions by installing 25-kW to 100-kW ‘mini power plants’ and then wiring villages and hamlets of up to 4000 inhabitants to deliver electricity on a pay-for-use basis. The company uses a biomass gasification based proprietary electricity generation process, that generates electricity using 100% producer gas based system (“single fuel mode”). HPS distributes electricity directly to households and small businesses while keeping costs low by running insulated wires along bamboo poles to subscribing households, businesses and farms.
In just four years HPS has installed 84 mini-power plants, providing electricity to over 200,000 people spread across 300 villages, and employing 350 people operating across the state of Bihar.
Each plant serves around 400 households, saving approximately 42,000 litres of kerosene and 18,000 litres of diesel per year, significantly reducing indoor air pollution and improving health conditions in rural areas.
HuskPower System : Current Implementation
HPS creates an ecosystem around each plant by providing income generation opportunities to local farmers and entrepreneurs. Additionally, it creates employment through its livelihood programmes such as the incense stick manufacturing program which largely employs women. This enables sustainable development within the communities HPS serves.
An annual international business and entrepreneurship competition for women called the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards has picked its new winner from the Asia Pacific region – she is Lianna Gunawan (pictured above) from Indonesian women’s handmade shoe store La Spina Collections [1]. Lianna managed to beat off strong competition from India’s online job marketplace for women Fleximoms.in and the eco products store from the Philippines, EchoStore. Olivia Lazare, the project leader of the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, explained about the decision:
The competition was tough in the Asian panel. Fleximoms and EchoStore are both very good projects. But at the end of the day what made the difference is the potential of growth and the scalability of La Spina Collections. Please keep in mind that the jury evaluate the projects with regards to the following criteria: social impact, financial sustainability and scalability and creativity.
Lianna has etched her name in Cartier’s history books as she’s the first ever Indonesian winner of the awards, which began in 2006. It’s been a good year for Lianna as she was also a runner-up at the Multiply and Femina Female Entrepreneurship Program this summer. It looks like her online business promotions rely heavily on its Facebook page and Multiply account.
The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards looks like a very interesting competition. It promises a cash prize of $20,000, a full year of coaching support, links to its international network, and brings media exposure to each of the six winners from six different regions – Latin America, North America, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia-Pacific.
The 2013 batch competition registration will be open from November 12th, 2012, to March 8th, 2013. Female entrepreneurs can check here for more information.
La Spina Collections is also an offline retailer with four stores so far. ↩
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Facebook Apps do collect your email ids and recently, a Mozilla blogger blogged about his experience of buying a million Facebook email addresses for only $5.
And surprisingly, most of these were real email ids.
There are sites (like this one) that sells not just Facebook App data but also Twitter active users (collected from Twitter apps):
“The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe. There are users from other countries as well but they are almost exclusively English speaking as well, as all the apps we provide are written in English and to use them properly one needs to read the instructions. The list is checked and validated once a month so you won’t get a list full of invalid or duplicate email addresses. Whether you are offering a Facebook, Twitter, social media related or otherwise a general product or service, this list has a great potential for you. Finally, the list is in a zipped excel format split into 12 sheets, each sheet containing roughly 100,000 email addresses with name, last name and facebook profile information separated with comma.”
These apps essentially harvest email addresses and sell them in the open market. And it’s not just one site, but there are several such sites that are selling anywhere between 1,00,000 – 4,00,000 Facebook profile details in the open market.
Scary? Well, yes. But then, privacy on the web is highly oxymoronic and you might just have to control your urge to start using each and every app (and allow full permission to the account).
What about Facebook/Twitter? Will they ever crackdown on such practices? It’s actually very hard to, unless they build a proxy messaging service on top of user email id.
[Image credit]
It’s proving a tough year for Chinese e-commerce verticals, with one struggling site having already exited at a low valuation, and many other specialist sites rumored to be in dire financial trouble. One such e-tailer is OKBuy, which sells only footwear. Rumors in the industry, as voiced by The Founder, are that OKBuy is losing senior executives and has run out of money. It’s believed to be seeking an acquisition by Tencent (HKG:0700), China’s biggest web company, which is also a previous investor in OKBuy.
The original article on The Founder went so far as to say that OKBuy was a hollowed out shell with few employees. But OKBuy’s CEO, Li Shubin (pictured), fired back on his personal Weibo page (see here) that the site has “over 700 employees” right now. However, he didn’t address the stories of exec defections, a lack of operating cash, or if the company was negotiating with Tencent.
OKBuy's Li Shubin (Image: news.cnblogs.com)
OKBuy’s massive series C round in June 2011 saw Tencent invest as much as $50 million in the footwear specialist site; DFJ also participated in that round, but the total input was never revealed.
While Tencent is pushing hard into e-commerce these days with its B2B2C online mall QQ Buy, which launched last October, it’s not assured that the web giant will come to the rescue of its investment. If OKBuy is acquired, it’d make a better fit into Tencent’s 51Buy.com site, which is more of an Amazon-meets-Zappos kind of B2C site.
Earlier this summer we’ve seen the once-promising Redbaby site cheat death by getting acquired by Suning – while others like clothing e-tailer Masa Maso are thought to be in danger, stuck on the same (slowly sinking) boat.
[Source: Marbridge]
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Sohu staff recently leaked a new spin-off plan for its video site SohuTV with an imminent IPO plan.
China’s video market showed some good signs recently. According to a new report by iResearch, the Chinnese Internet thinktank, in terms of monthly page views Youku(4.846b), Tudou(2.674b) and SohuTV(3.131b) won the first three places. The former two have been moving at a steady pace together, while other players are focusing on different directions. It looks like this market’s business model (ad-supported plus subscription fee) and ecosystem are gradually mature and being accepted.
Lower Contents Costs
Latest data from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) said that the contents costs in Q2 and Q3 of this year has fallen rapidly, e.g. the price for TV plays dropped by 60% yoy. Back in 2010, hot plays could cost RMB 300,000-800,000 per episode or even higher, which was a big burden for video sites. The reduction in contents costs will definitely speed up the monetization of video sites since content costs and bandwidth are the top two cost burdens for them.
One industry insider noted that “the content war is about to end, and the chance of a price surge again is very thin. The whole market will move on to healthy competition.”
In addition, the past three years have seen a very steady increase in video sites’ ad revenues. iResearch data showed that as revenues of the whole tech industry up by 41.4%, as for video sector, the number is 74.6%. Insiders predict that some big guys may see profits earlier than they had expected.
Sohu TV IPO, A Rising Big Player
The spin-off plan for SohuTV was firstly raised in April. Recently CEO Charles Zhang said that, “currently we’re focusing on video and searching, as well as on the mobile and social trend.” The revenue sources of SohuTV include ads, copyright distribution and paid contents, which all enjoyed some growth.
Apart from ads, copyright distribution also contributed a lot to the whole revenue. As the first video site that introduced copyrighted American TV plays into China, SohuTV hosted a dedicated channel for all those plays (most of which are the hottest ones). “We want to serve the users with rich, multi-dimensional watching experiences,” said Deng Ye, CEO of Sohu Video.
Screenshot of SohuTV
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Suhehui, a newly-founded tech incubator in China just pulled curtain off the very first ten enrollees of its 4-months long boot camp. The Shanghai-based launchpad for startups selects promising projects twice a year, investing RMB 20k into them in exchange for a 8% stake in each of them.
Suhehui will also actively hunting new rounds for its graduates with a following RMB 80k infusion into projects it takes a like to.
These ten enrollees, ranging from social networking services, ecommerce to enterprise-oriented projects, include:
1. WanZi Earth
WanZi Earth is a travel site focusing on finding local tour guides for its users, quite different from other online travel products. On WanZi Earth, you are likely to come across local citizens who are willing to guide you and experience genuine local customs with you. Launched in March, 2012, WanZi Earth now has about 600 local tour guides in over 20 countries. The product, according to its founder Song HaiBo, aspired to be the No.1 of amateur tour guide market.
2、DoNever
DoNever is a college social network. Unlike Facebook and its Chinese clone RenRen, DoNever is a stranger-centric social service which allows you to know more classmates in your university.
According to the founder, what matters most is to make sure they have user base in every school. Currently, they are expanding its user base by promoting activities. It has already accumulated 300k users and is expected to reach 1 million users by the end of this year, almost 2000 users per school on average.
ShaLou Time is a UGC site which presents users’ pictures on fashion, travel, art design, food, etc. ShaLou Time intends to be a social shopping website where users can recommend things to friends and receive buying advice from friends which differs from those ecommerce referral sites like Meilishuo and Mogujie.
The website was once a photo sharing community dubbed ShaLou, with 100 PV at peak. ShaLou Time’s CEO, Qiang WeiYa was a young man at his twenties with a strong team.
4、YiJin
YiJin is an ecomm site with a clear target of women’s stockings, socking and underwear. Before they got started, the team did a market research and they found that almost all stockings are old-fashioned and of low-quality and the potential market in stockings is estimated to be around RMB 120 billion.
Zhu WenJian, CEO of YiJin said the team’s strength lies in distribution channels. They already have 9 e-stores, 13 distribution networks and 17 channels partnering with other business.
5、YueTi
YueTi is a social network for sports fans aiming at providing them with mobile, global and personalized service online and offline, such as information on sports games/brands/stadiums/equipment and sports activities. The founder has worked in the tech world for eight years and then stepped into the sports for three years.
6、Picktime
Picktime is professional in multimedia interactive technology including AR, body-motion sensing, etc. Picktime once partnered with advertising company, offering users engaging interactive experience. It also launched its application, virtual dressing room, on Taobao.
Picktime plans to jump out the box of technology and partner more with online and offline carriers, such as replacing conventional billboards with interactive shop windows which can recommend passers-by with fashionable dressing and offer interesting games to people.
7、DaZhuoZi
DaZhuoZi, or DzzDesktop, is a cloud desktop which endeavors to replace native desktop. With integrated interactive system which allows multi-user, multi-location and multi-device operation, it’s becoming easier to manage more than just one desktop computers on a consolidated basis.
8、Mike CRM
Mike CRM (Customer Relation Management) aims to provide powerful business solution with a user-friendly and elegant UI for SME.
9、Magicrew
Magicrew aims at making video demos for Internet/mobile Internet developers so that their products are more vividly presented to investors or users. Its homepage contains a lot of videos produced by Magicrew, some are cute and some are really attractive, you may enjoy by yourself!
10. Jidao Game
Game developing.
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More news from the folks at DeNA (TYO:2432) today as the Japanese gaming company is announcing a partnership to bring its Mobage platform to Taiwanese smartphone users, cooperating with leading local web portal Yahoo Kimo.
The deal will mean that Mobage mobile apps for iOS and Android will be made available via the games icon at the top of Yahoo Kimo’s mobile portal (see the games page, pictured below). The Mobage titles that are currently available in traditional Chinese include popular titles like Ninja Royale and Cygames Inc’s Rage of Bahamut.
Interestingly, Yahoo Hong Kong’s mobile site will also feature a mobile games option from which users can then arrive at this new Yahoo Kimo games section. So DeNA is actually reaching more than just Taiwan here. Yahoo Kimo’s managing director Frank Chen noted in the announcement:
With the combination of internationally popular games brought from DeNA and featured content compiled by Yahoo!Kimo editors, we’ll bring our users the best mobile social gaming experience.
As we have mentioned before, DeNA has been quite active in mainland China over the past year, with similar Mobage partnerships with companies like Renren, Kaixin001, and lots more besides.
Just two weeks ago, the wildly popular Rage of Bahamut was launched on Mobage China as well.
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