It was only last summer that China entered the era of legal – and free – MP3 downloads, courtesy of web portals such as Baidu Music. But that heyday is already close to being over, with major sites like Baidu Music and Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QQ Music preparing to eliminate free downloads, to be replaced by monthly subscriptions.
Many Chinese sites that offer music will band together (in a rare show of unity) to implement these MP3 download subscriptions, starting at the beginning of next year. The anticipated cost will be in the range of 10 to 15 RMB (US$1.60 to $2.39) per month. Wang Hao, chief executive officer of music startup Xiami, tells the China Daily:
The era of the free lunch for China’s online music industry might be coming to an end.
Xiami, Baidu, Tencent, and many others will keep online music streaming free of charge, and the subscriptions will apply only to downloads of licensed music MP3s. It’ll bring the Chinese music industry more in line with its very mature online gaming sector, where virtual currencies, paid extras, and monthly packages have been in action for nearly a decade. Xiami’s Wang Hao adds:
Good music is not getting the attention it deserves, while online games are making profits, and forcing musicians to earn money through other channels.
This could put small music labels on a par with game developers – thereby giving them a much better chance of monetization.
But despite a move towards licensed music content on major web portals in China in the past year, music piracy remains rife nationwide – both online and offline. So the shift to a subscription model – as seen in other markets on Rdio, Spotify, Rhapsody, and many more services – does also risk losing grasp of consumers who’ll go towards the path of least resistance. And that, for Chinese consumers, will be getting MP3 downloads from P2P services, or ripping pirated CDs onto their PCs and smartphones.
An NHK news report warns that installing Windows 8 will not turn your PC display intro a touchscreen. I love that they used the yellow alert graphic! And the host doesn’t look condescending at all!
Here’s a fun story going around the Japanese interwebs, courtesy the good folks over on Reddit. There are Japanese media reports saying that many consumers are misunderstanding what happens to your PC when you install the new Windows 8.
After Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) new operating system became available on October 26, many Japanese consumers installed it with the expectation their PC would suddenly have touchscreen capabilities. Of course, if your device doesn’t have touchscreen capabilities already, Windows 8 won’t magically bestow that functionality upon your display.
This misunderstanding might strike most of us as pretty funny. But the sad reality is that for many consumers who aren’t that knowledgable about computer hardware and software, it really isn’t that surprising that some are confused about what they are getting with Windows 8, given that most of the focus these days is on the new touch features.
Microsoft is spending over a billion dollars to market the launch of its new operating system. And while I think the vast majority of users will be just fine with OS, I do hope the folks in Redmond set aside some cash for support calls too.
What constitutes the ultimate customer experience? How do you build a Rockstar product? Find out at Start-up@Singapore’s first Speaker Series. Start-Up@Singapore, Singapore’s largest startup challenge, is organizing the first of its Speaker Series on November 1, with the theme Product Development and Innovation. Speakers who will be sharing their experience and know-how include Aileen Sim...
What constitutes the ultimate customer experience? How do you build a Rockstar product? Find out at Start-up@Singapore’s first Speaker Series. Start-Up@Singapore, Singapore’s largest startup challenge, is organizing the first of its Speaker Series on November 1, with the theme Product Development and Innovation. Speakers who will be sharing their experience and know-how include Aileen Sim...
The award, which is Singapore’s highest accolade for infocomm innovation, was presented to iTwin by Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, minister for Information, Communications and the Arts at a gala dinner on 23rd October.
The startup is known for a double-sided thumbdrive that lets users securely and remotely access files from another location. It recently launched a new feature called SecureBox, which enables the device to act as a ‘key’ to users’ Dropbox files.
The other winner in the same category is Puffersoft Labs, which has developed a solution for enterprises to simplify their end-user client computing deployment and management.
After three months of intense hacking, coding, biz refinement, and some pivoting, China’s funkiest incubator, Chinaccelerator, yesterday graduated all eight of its 2012 batch. Rather than heading up to the incubator’s home-base in Dalian, the Demo Day event took place in downtown Beijing.
Chinaccelerator has a pretty good track record. One of last year’s graduates, OrderWithMe, went on to win TechChrunch Disrupt in Beijing a short while later, and the super-funky PiktoChart has graced the stage at our own Startup Arena contest in Singapore earlier this year. The incubator was founded by Cyril Ebersweiler, who’s also in demand as a mentor at 500startups, OnLab, and lots of other places.
The 2012 batch is all killer and no filler (and includes some startups we’ve profiled already), so these are some startup teams to watch:
AdConnect
This startup has already launched its free app cross promotion network, AppSpree.me, which is aimed at early-stage startups that have apps. We talked to co-founder Andrew Boos earlier this month, who describes AppSpree as “a zero-cost way to help apps grow” via its customizable cross-promotions.
HopCab
Unlike the rest of the 2012 batch, HopCab is focused on a different country – Malaysia. Launched earlier this summer, and centered around its iPhone app (the Android version is coming soon), it’s a location-based service for booking cabs or executive cars-for-hire. Before you even book your ride, the app can help you get an estimated cost for your journey. It’s currently operational in Kuala Lumpur and Penang.
QuWanBa
QuWanBa (or “LetsGoOut” in English) takes a different philosophical approach to the other 2012 batch startups, encouraging people, in the words of founder Yung-Chung Lin, to “reconnect in real life and rediscover the love shared among us.” This “offline socializing” startup will monetize from offline travel transactions, sort of like Airbnb, on its “peer-to-peer activities and happenings” service. The site is at QuWan.ba, which will launch on November 3rd.
7Colors
7Colors has already rolled out as a cross-platform online learning platform for children. From its homepage at 7colors.cc, it already has a lot of education-oriented Windows, Android, and iOS apps.
WeiboAgent
Another one to have already launched into action is WeiboAgent, a service that aims to help brands do much better social media marketing on Sina Weibo, the nation’s hottest Twitter clone. Essentially, as the co-founder recently told us, it’s a SaaS advisory tool built on top of social media analytics – but it has actual human advisors onboard to help out its users in their marketing to Chinese consumers.
TuiCool TuiCool is a social network oriented around reading. From its UI it looks to be halfway between Reddit and the China-made Wumii Reader, and it’s backed up by a very alpha-stage Android app.
ToyCloud ToyCloud is doing something that sounds both insane and very neat – encouraging people to create apps that can control toys. The website is up, but the SDK for all this hackery – which would let things like radio-controlled cars be maneuvered by smartphone swipes or voice commands – is still in the works. There will also be hardware, in the form of RC cars, sold via the ToCloud website.
QiuQiu
Lastly, there’s QiuQiu, which is a social dating platform that’s currently in open-but-quiet beta. Co-founder and CEO Michael Lewis tells us that the idea behind QiuQiu is that “the two most common ways that people meet each other are through their friends/family, and online – we are combining it and putting it on an app.” The app is close to ready for a full launch, but for now is being kept under wraps. With stats indicating there could be more than 30 million adult males in surfeit to the female adult population in a few years’ time, China is sitting on a bachelor timebomb. And clued-up dating apps could be the answer. Or more homosexuality. Either way, it’s all cool.
Many investors will have been in the Demo Day audience – place your bets in the comments as to which of the startups have the promise to attract VC backing.
Secure file-sharing service, iTwin, walked away from the National Infocomm Awards with the Most Innovative Product/Service. For those unfamiliar with iTwin, it is a reinvented form of a thumbdrive that allows file secure, wireless local file-sharing between two computers without any cables. The product consists of a pair of identical USB dongles that when plugged into two...
Secure file-sharing service, iTwin, walked away from the National Infocomm Awards with the Most Innovative Product/Service. For those unfamiliar with iTwin, it is a reinvented form of a thumbdrive that allows file secure, wireless local file-sharing between two computers without any cables. The product consists of a pair of identical USB dongles that when plugged into two...
Platformed creativity. Creative commerce. The maker movement. These words could very well become mainstream vernacular in the near future, not just in the West, but also in Asia.
Several digital trends are converging to make that happen. E-commerce and smartphone adoption are on the rise, and tastes in Asia are becoming more sophisticated. More consumers are demanding not just for cheap but also well-designed goods. Businesses are starting to recognize the need for effective branding, and are willing to hire designers to spruce up their image.
Just as important is the fact that creative professionals are warming up to the idea of using the Internet as a avenue to grow their businesses. The platforms, created by startups that sense a growing need for better tools, have become more sophisticated, social, and user-friendly.
Call it the rise of platformed creativity. Think of a flea market where upstart fashion designers go to sell their creations. Or an indie art gallery in a colonial shophouse. Now migrate all of these online. That’s platformed creativity at its core — aggregating creative products online, and then selling it to an audience.
But there’s more to it. E-commerce has always been about the buyers and sellers. Shoppers visit Amazon to purchase a book, but they don’t get a chance to talk to the author about how much they love or hate the plot. Similarly, consumers can visit Zalora to purchase a dress, but they can never meet the designer who created the item.
Platformed creativity can involve bringing creators and buyers together virtually to engage in a dialogue that could shape the product. Sure, not every consumer wants to talk to a creator and vice-versa. Those that do belong to the long tail — not the Justin Biebers of the world, but the burgeoning singers and aspiring film-makers.
Let’s come back to the flea market and art gallery where upstart fashion designers and artists ply their trade. At this stage of their careers, they’re focused on creating a following. If you’re not Andy Warhol, you’d damn well get out there and make sure people know your name and what you’re about. So, platformed creativity is not just about the products. It’s about giving creators a more prominent face.
The idea itself is nothing new. MySpace has long catered to indie singers and musicians, while Amazon has opened its platform to self-publishers. Startups like Fab and Etsy give designer-manufacturers a platform to reach a wider audience, while Kickstarter links entrepreneurs to passionate people who are willing to fund their ideas.
Sure, Asia doesn’t have its own Fabs, Etsys and Kickstarters. But we may not be far away. Startup ecosystems are maturing in Asia, and the result of that is the birth of native platforms catering to creative professionals.
Crowdfunding has emerged as a nascent movement in Asia. In Indonesia, Wujudkan.com has successfully raised money for movie projects, books, and games. Sites like Togather.Asia from Singapore and ArtisteConnect from Philippines have become venues for indie musicians to raise funds to produce albums.
There are a few more worth mentioning. The Global Creative Network, founded by Singapore entrepreneur Alex Goh, is one to watch.
The network consists of an editorial site, DesignTAXI, and two platforms for creative professionals — The Creative Finder and The Bazaar.
The Creative Finder is an online community and marketplace for designers and photographers to engage with fellow professionals, as well as upload, share, and sell their works. It also has a rather unique feature: Visitors can embed some of these works on other websites. The Creative Finder becomes a platform to connect online publishers with creatives.
The Bazaar, meanwhile, is a platform to buy and sell all things creative, including paintings, glassware, books, stationery, and woodwork. It contains about 200,000 items from over 8,400 stores, shipping to 226 countries.
Another Singapore company, OuterEdit.com, is taking platformed creativity to the bleeding edge. Like Threadless, OuterEdit is a website that sells unique, limited-edition T-shirt designs. Both are also avenues for designers to submit their creations and build a fanbase.
But where OuterEdit is different is that it is also an online workroom, if you will, where several designers gather regularly in ’O/E Collab’ sessions to create graphics, edit, and critique each other’s designs.
The whole process is transparent — visitors can track how the session is progressing and even contribute by giving feedback and voting for their favorites. The winning design gets made into T-shirts and is sold through OuterEdit.com.
Essentially, OuterEdit is democratizing design and e-commerce. Consumers become co-creators and co-curators. They influence how the final designs turn out and pick which ones get sold on the web store (read our feature on the startup). Then they buy.
Asia’s own creative renaissance is still in its infancy. Most of these startups are really young — a bunch of them only launched in 2012. Promising as they are, a big question remains over whether they can become viable businesses. These companies still need to validate their products, scale up, and hopefully find that the hipster crowd in Asia is large enough to sustain their businesses.
Unfortunately, Asian e-commerce startups — and those catering to the indie crowd especially — are disadvantaged at the moment when compared to their Western counterparts, due to the highly diverse region containing a mixture of developed and developing economies, each with their own infrastructural, logistical, and communication challenges.
Until these challenges can be overcome, it is best to resist the temptation of calling any of these startups the next Fab or Etsy.
Nevertheless, startups like OuterEdit and The Creative Finder, with their originality and ingenuity, give the region hope. Perhaps they can take heart from the impact of Hatsune Miku, a Japanese creation and perhaps one of the most unique examples of platformed creativity.
Hatsune is a pop star. Created in 2007 by Crypton Future Media as a way to promote a singer synthesizer app, Hatsune soon exploded in popularity and took on a life of its own.
It’s loyal fans have created her backstory, or stories, and even wrote songs that were sold on iTunes and sung in Hatsune concerts. One was held in Singapore in 2011 and had 3,000 fans wave light sticks while a hologram — Hatsune herself — pranced around on stage singing fan-made songs.
There’s even Hatsune-porn for those who are so inclined, but let’s not go there.
In a Wired story documenting the phenomenon (and which was roundly criticized by rabid Hatsune fans), she’s been called a ‘wiki-celebrity’ and the result of a ‘database model of creation’. She’s a unique product of her country too. The Japanese often don’t see a difference between the original and spin-off products. Fan fiction and works even have a special Japanese term — niji sousaku, which means “secondary creativity”.
Hatsune Miku is the fulfillment of platformed creativity’s promise: Where there’s less or even no distinction between consumer and creator, and where the product becomes a meme that attains virality and replicates itself.
Kickstarter and Etsy have done that for many of their users, turning indie creators into success stories through social media.
Their equivalents in Asia, however, need to nurture their own Hatsune: a product that they can co-create, replicate, and recreate. And watch as it comes alive.
Crowdworks, a Tokyo-based startup providing a crowdsourcing platform that matches engineers and designers with job postings, just announced today that it has raised a total amount of $3.75 million (300 million yen) from Itochu Technology Ventures, Digital Garage, and Suneight Investment.
The service was launched in March of this year, and has acquired more than 2,000 corporate clients who are posting jobs on the platform. So far projects worth more than $8 million have been matched in the six months since the launch.
Since before launching the startup, Crowdworks’s CEO, Koichi Yoshida, has been helping his clients set up their business in Vietnam and China. Their business model is basically facilitating job requests and matching between developed and developing countries. In other words, they are bringing jobs from corporate users in the US and Japan to freelance engineers and designers in the South East Asia region.
Mr. Yoshida tells me that this effort helps eliminate income disparities between developed and developing countries. With the funds raised, is keen to intensify business expansion in Vietnam, the Phillipines, mainland China, Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Silicon Valley.
iProperty has moved the operations base of CommercialAsia from Singapore to Hong Kong, and has appointed a new general manager. Asian property portal iProperty has announced moving its base of operations for its CommercialAsia.com brand from Singapore to Hong Kong. Along with this, the startup has announced a new general manager, Ben Chien. Chien is responsible for...
iProperty has moved the operations base of CommercialAsia from Singapore to Hong Kong, and has appointed a new general manager. Asian property portal iProperty has announced moving its base of operations for its CommercialAsia.com brand from Singapore to Hong Kong. Along with this, the startup has announced a new general manager, Ben Chien. Chien is responsible for...
ACE Beijing, the first overseas chapter of the Action Community for Entrepreneurship, has welcomed its first batch of 14 Singapore start-ups interested in venturing into China, four months after its launch.
The Singaporean entrepreneurs brought with them ideas ranging from online car rental to digital image recognition. Besides hearing from experienced entrepreneurs at the ACE BlueSky Conference @ Beijing, the rookies also got to sharpen their selling skills at the event, pitching their business plans to a panel of judges. And building connections was what they did at the conference, which was also attended by guests like Mr Mo Weigang, who’s in charge of entrepreneurship for the Communist Youth League in Beijing.
Veteran Singaporean entrepreneurs and businessmen like Mr Douglas Foo of the Sakae Sushi chain and Mr Bennett Neo, regional director of Asia Pacific Breweries as well as China-based investors like Mr Jui Tan, partner of BlueRun Ventures were also present at the event to give their advice.
As Professor Wong Poh Kam, director of NUS Entrepreneurship Centre and an active angel investor in Silicon Valley and Asia, said during a panel discussion at the conference, emerging markets like China and India are where the greatest growth potential lies. ”I’d rather invest in entrepreneurs who can identify unique problems and solutions in emerging markets, who can then push it to other emerging markets,” he said. Rather than just taking an idea from Silicon Valley and replicating it elsewhere, there’s a greater chance of getting a winner if someone comes up with an unique idea in an emerging market instead, he added.
Besides providing a network of mentors, ACE Beijing also can help start-ups from Singapore find a place to work in Beijing. It has secured an incubation space in Zhongguancun, China’s answer to Silicon Valley, to provide a landing pad with facilities and business services. The National University of Singapore (NUS) Enterprise Incubator is also co-funding this and providing mentors.
The piece was contributed by Jason Lin, the Co-Founder at SpeakingMax.cn, an English learning website based in Beijing, China. He also sits on the Communications Committee of ACE Beijing Chapter.
The Wuhan Morning Post (via QQ Games) brings us another tale in the annals of Chinese game-addicted youngsters behaving badly. Qian Zhan, a former college student in Wuhan, apparently became so addicted to online games that his missed classes and homework piled up to the point that he couldn’t graduate. Staying on in Wuhan and doing makeup work in an attempt to earn his degree, Qian lied to his parents about his gaming habit and told them that he had graduated on time and was working for a software company. When his father learned of the lie and headed to Wuhan to confront him, the presumably humiliated Qian Zhan fled.
That was three years ago, and his parents haven’t heard from him since.
The addiction began in 2005 when Qian, who was studying software, began making frequent trips to the local internet cafe to “check information and study.” This seemed logical to his family — after all, he was studying computers — but actually Qian Zhan was immersing himself in web games and, like the kids in so many of these horror stories before him, found it difficult to quit.
Qian Zhan is still missing, and it’s not clear whether he’s still playing games and is just too ashamed to see his parents or whether there is something else going on. His story and others like it are often used in China as evidence of the evils of online gaming, but I think Qian’s flight might also be understood as a reminder that Chinese parents can sometimes be a bit too harsh when it comes to punishing gamers (see: gaming addiction boot camps).
Obviously, when games have delayed your college graduation, the problem is probably serious enough to warrant a dramatic solution. But did Qian run away in part out of fear that his parents would lock him away in one of China’s military-style boot camps? Until he turns up, there’s no way to know. But while we’re telling horror stories about the perils of online gaming, it’s probably relevant to recall that fear of extreme responses from parents are probably part of the reason some children hide their gaming habits while things slowly get out of hand.
