Media-oriented startup FilmSkout emerged as the winner at the recently-ended Hong Kong Startup Weekend. What’s so great about enabling better venues for photographers and videographers? Startup Weekend paid Hong Kong a visit last November 9 to 11, and during the 54-hour event, 90 entrepreneurs met and built their prototypes and made their pitch in the...
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Media-oriented startup FilmSkout emerged as the winner at the recently-ended Hong Kong Startup Weekend. What’s so great about enabling better venues for photographers and videographers? Startup Weekend paid Hong Kong a visit last November 9 to 11, and during the 54-hour event, 90 entrepreneurs met and built their prototypes and made their pitch in the...
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GREE Advertising CEO Tatsuhei Asanuma, AppDisco CFO BumRyung Yoo
We haven’t heard too much about GREE Advertising, the ad subsidiary of the Japanese gaming giant which was launched back in April. But this week it has announced a tie-up with South Korea’s AppDisco, the maker of the popular AdLatte application, which rewards users with redeemable points for watching ads and answering quizzes.
The partnership will see GREE Advertising become the exclusive advertising agent in Japan for AdLatte on both Android and iOS. AdLatte has been doing well in Japan thus far with over a million subscribers in Japan, in addition to the three million subscribers it has at home in Korea. Back in December of last year, it was briefly the top free iOS app in the Japan app store.
The announcement further states that the two companies hope to create “new promotional opportunities for developer and advertisers alike.”
Back in August GREE Advertising announced a partnership with French mobile affiliate network MobPartner to help bring new promotional tools and user acquisition services to developers on the GREE platform.
The GREE subsidiary is to later have offices overseas, notably in North America, Europe, and Asia, to help facilitate these kinds of global partnerships.
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The Jakarta Post reports that Rakuten Belanja Online (RBO, meaning “Rakuten Online Shopping”) has 400 merchants with 300,000 products offered online, representing 500 percent growth in the past 18 months since Rakuten’s launch in Indonesia in June 2011.
80 percent of RBO’s merchants are small- and medium-sized enterprises, with the remaining 20 percent major companies such as Sony and Nissin. Rakuten Belanja has hit double-digit growth every month and triple-digit growth every year so far.
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Chinese phone-maker Meizu has just sent out invitations for the reveal of its newest phone, the MX2. It’ll replace the dual-core MX, and it might even make the more recent MX 4-Core obsolete, even though that just came out in June of this year. The MX2 will hopefully see a price drop to bring it more in-line with the latest wave of China-brand budget quad-core Android phones. The event will be at the Beijing Water Cube on Tuesday, November 27th.
The post Meizu Preps MX2 Launch, Makes a Date for November 27 appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi has today confirmed its acquisition of Duokan, a startup maker of e-reader and Apple TV apps. The financial details have not been revealed, but the wholesale buy-up will see Duokan CEO, Wang Chuan, installed as the eigth core Xiaomi team-member.
Xiaomi currently has only two smartphone models for sale, the Android-based 1S and Mi2, and has confirmed that it will reveal its Xiaomi TV set-top box – thought to be called the Xiaomi Box – tomorrow. The Duokan acquisition will clearly be relevant to both of Xiaomi’s products, with the Duokan e-reader software likely going onto the smartphones, and the Duokan TV app perhaps surfacing in an all-new version for the Xiaomi Box. We’ll see tomorrow.
Duokan raised $10 million in series A funding in May of this year, led by Xu Xiaoping, MorningSide Ventures, and none other than Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s founder.
Duokan is best known for its Kindle firmware, which replaces Amazon’s own software on the Kindle with Duokan’s own platform for reading and downloading e-books. Later Duokan launched more conventional e-reader apps for Android and iOS, and more recently added Windown Phone and Apple TV to its repertoire.
In our recent interview with Lei Jun, he made it clear that the disruptive phone-maker was keen to diversify its hardware, but that it wasn’t going to take the more obvious route of making an Android tablet.
[Source: QQ Tech - article in Chinese]
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Earlier this year we suggested that 360Buy, China’s second-largest B2C e-commerce site, was focusing on a major new funding round rather than prepping a US IPO. And that seems to be a step closer to reality today with rumors on ChinaByte and some other sources saying that 360Buy has secured series D funding worth $400 million.
The huge fourth round of funding for 360Buy is said to have been led by Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund (OTRF), with participation from the Tiger Fund. As large as the investment amount is, it effectively values 360Buy at $7.25 billion, which is a lot less than the $10 billion or more that the e-tailer was pegged at after its $500 million injection from DST in April of last year. Indeed, it would mean 360Buy’s valuation has been slashed by a quarter.
Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund is Canada’s third-largest retirement fund. Bloomberg reported last week that the OTRF is planning to open a Hong Kong office in 2013 as a part of its strategy to diversify the group’s investments.
This summer I asked what on earth 360Buy is truly worth, amidst wildly fluctuating numbers of its eventual evaluation when it finally lists publicly. Some in the e-commerce industry in China reckon that 360Buy should not be evaulated on the same price-to-sales ratio as Amazon, since 360Buy is in a much less stable a position compared to Amazon in the US and many other markets. To cut a long story short, some industry experts reckon that a valuation of $5 to $6 billion is closer to the mark.
360Buy has not commented on these rumors, and CEO and founder Liu Qiangdong has been unusually quiet on social media in the past month.
[Source: ChinaByte - article in Chinese]
The post China’s 360Buy Rumored to Have Secured Major Series D Funding, But Valued at Less Than Before appeared first on Tech in Asia.
DeNA (TYO:2432) points out today that its mobile RPG Blood Brothers reached the top of the Google Play top grossing app charts in the US over the weekend. The fantasy RPG has been doing well for the past few months, gradually climbing up in the top ten until it briefly took the top spot this past Saturday (see chart below).
Interestingly, the app that Blood Brothers knocked out of the first spot (temporarily) was another Mobage title, Rage of Bahamut. That game held that position for almost six months. DeNA’s executive games director Kenji Kobayashi is pleased with the success of this up-and-coming title:
Following the success of Rage of Bahamut, we are delighted to see Blood Brothers also gaining remarkable popularity in the U.S. and other countries. […] In Japan, DeNA has accumulated extensive know-how on rapidly iterative game design, where we constantly and quickly incorporate user feedback to our games. We see Blood Brothers’ success as another solid proof point that the model works across borders, not just in Japan.
source: app annie
And indeed, Blood Brothers has been very popular in a number of regions, becoming the top grossing app in more than 22 countries, including France and Canada, plus India, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines here in Asia.
How’s Blood Brothers doing on iOS? That version of the game launched back in August, and ranks as a top ten top grossing app for the ‘role playing’ and ‘adventure’ categories. The app claims over 150,000 downloads to date.
Check out the trailer for Blood Brothers below.
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