China’s Taobao and Tmall Top 1 Trillion RMB ($159 Billion) in Sales So Far This Year

China’s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba, has just announced that two of its sites, Taobao and Tmall, have collectively hit RMB 1 trillion (US$159.5 billion) in sales for the whole of 2012. Well, from January to the end of November. That huge figure has been hit one month before the end of the year, reached on the night of November 30th.

When we heard Alibaba CEO and founder Jack Ma talk in September of last year at the company’s annual conference, he said he was aiming for “one trillion RMB in transactions” in China in 2012 on Tmall and Taobao. So he’s now got what he wanted.

The news is confirmed by an official post on the Taobao BBS (see it here in Chinese). For the sake of comparison, an Alibaba spokesperson tells us that the “2011 GMV [sales transactions] for Taobao.com was never announced, but for Tmall.com it was RMB 100 billion [$15.95 billion].” She adds:

This is a symbolic milestone in that it shows e-commerce has become an intrinsic part of how Chinese consumers shop for goods and services; this is also significant because we are seeing high speed growth in the [smaller] third and fourth tier cities, even outpacing consumer spending growth in first and second tier cities.

It is indeed a sign of the maturation of China’s e-commerce sector when the general populace now seems to be outspending the generally more affluent – but fewer in number – Chinese middle-class, who tend to live in wealthier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, and (Alibaba’s hometown) Hangzhou.

The two shopping sites saw a total of $3 billion in sales in just 24 hours during China’s recent November 11th online sales day – a figure which surpassed the entire spending online in the whole of the US on Cyber Monday.

This graph shows the growth in sales transactions on the B2C and C2C online malls since Taobao first started in 2003:

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Red Dot Ventures invests USD490k in The Stakeholder Management Company

A Singapore startup, The Stakeholder Management Company (TSC), has created an online platform that generates visualizations to untangle the complex web of stakeholder relationships. It has already been used by Fortune 500 companies like HP, Nokia, and Syngenta.

For these accomplishments, it has secured SGD600k (USD490k) in seed investments from Red Dot Ventures, a Singapore-based startup incubator that is part of NRF-TIS, a government-funded co-investment scheme. The development was announced on 26 November.

Founded by Terence Lyons in 2011, who was at Microsoft leading its global enterprise value marketing strategy and CSR engagement, TSC maps out issues affecting a company and the positions stakeholders are taking in it. It can then identify who the influencers are in the issue, and allow companies to engage them, all within one web platform.

If, for example, a baby milk company wants to examine a controversy surrounding contaminated milk that is dragging down its reputation, it can use TSC to visualize who are the key people or organizations driving the conversation. It can even rate how prominent each influencer is.

This saves the milk company from manually trawling Google and social networks to keep tabs on the brewing media storm.

Once the key conversationalists and decision makers are identified, and this group can include the regulatory authorities, media personalities, and even rival milk companies, the platform allows the user to see a profile card of the influencer and proceed to engage them.

“This is CRM meets 6 degrees of separation meets big data issue mining. ” said Terence. “Essentially it’s your stakeholders relationship mapping on demand, cutting edge intel at your fingertips and it saves our customers literally years of building the right stakeholder network.”

The company’s investor, Red Dot Ventures, believes big businesses today are looking for intelligent and scalable way to manage complex stakeholder relationships. According to Leslie Loh, managing director at the firm, the company’s rapidly expanding client base influenced its decision to invest.

TSC had recently secured a contract with a big energy firm to help manage a multi-billion dollar infrastructure endeavor. Its platform has been deployed in various projects in Qatar, Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, and Peru, in sectors like food, ICT, finance, oil, gas and mining.

It is the second company that Red Dot Ventures has funded in a month. On 7 November, it announced a SGD589k (USD480k) investment in Innova Technology, a Singapore startup whose flagship product Protag, a thin, card-like device, can prevent consumers from losing their wallets, bags, and other personal belongings.

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CRM, analytics and big data startup The Stakeholder Company gets S$600K from Red Dot Ventures

Red Dot Ventures is investing S$600,000 in CRM, market intelligence and big data firm The Stakeholder Company.

Doing business is more than just focusing on sales and revenue. These days, your bottomline is affected by how well you connect with customers and how quickly you are able to gain traction with your target audience. Firms like The Stakeholder Company (TSC) help businesses solve issues and find opportunities through data intelligence.

TSC has just announced an investment of S$600,000 by Red Dot Ventures, given the rising trend for businesses to manage complex stakeholder relationships. TSC has so far serviced A-listers like HP, Nokia Siemens and Syngenta, and has recently entered into a contract with a major energy firm to “reduce political and operational risks” relevant to a new multibillion-dollar infrastructure project.

TSC uses proprietary technologies in mapping trends and synthesizing key influencers, organizations, conversations, topics and authority, among others. “This is CRM meets 6 degrees of separation meets big data issue mining,” highlights founder Terence Lyons, who said the company was founded from the need for multinationals to reengineer and protect their corporate reputations.

Terence also stresses that their service saves customers “literally years of building the right stakeholder network” through cutting-edge intel and relationship-mapping on demand.

“This is a highly scalable market,” adds Red Dot Ventures managing director Leslie Loh, noting how market intelligence can benefit both startups and established businesses alike.

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The Entrepreneur Who Lost it All, and Made It Back Again

I recently met Douglas Gan (pictured above), someone who I would certainly call a gutsy entrepreneur. Some of you might not know Douglas, but perhaps you might recall ShowNearby which was acquired by Yellow Pages in 2010. ShowNearby was founded by Douglas and his friend Lee Chang Jin in March 2008. But this is just a portion of Douglas’s story. His journey as an entrepreneur started at age four back when he was still in kindergarten, when he was playing with toy cars and sold one to a classmate for $2. Throughout his school years, he would sell marbles, bubble gum, chewing gum, stamps, sticker albums, Dragonball and magic cards amassing a tidy sum of SGD$20,000 (about US$16,400) by 16.

Douglas recalls being inspired by the dot-com boom in 1996. His first venture onto the internet was in the world of mIRC, a popular chat client back then. He was messing with mIRC bots and scripts, which performed instructed functions. For example, setting someone as a moderator in a chat channel or providing MP3 files to users when they ask for them. But while enjoying the world of mIRC, Douglas realized it couldn’t bring in money. And that realization eventually led him to found PureHostings, a web hosting company. His server business spanned over six countries with 3,500 paying customers before it was sold to Skydio.

PureHostings wasn’t an entirely smooth ride for Douglas though. While business was great during the dot-com boom, Douglas had to find ways to scrap and survive during the bust. While he previously did sales over email, he was forced to go door to door for sales in the industrial park in Singapore to ask if people required his hosting services.

He faced many rejections but learned a lot along the way, improving his pitch with each rejection. Finally, there was one customer who told him that if he could fixed his computer, he would buy whatever services he was providing. The problem turned out to be an easy fix for Douglas, and was enough to impress the client who kept his promise. He didn’t know what Douglas had to offer, but was willing to pay for it regardless. The company had problems with its slow fax machines, file sharing, and internet connection. So Douglas helped to set up broadband internet, FTP folders for file sharing, and also provided an email service to replace faxes.

From then on Douglas was in hot demand as other companies looked to leverage on similar technologies to improve business processes. From this incident, Douglas said he learned to understand that fulfilling client’s needs makes good money.

During the dot com bust, there were few clients using his servers. So instead Douglas used the extra space to host OhGenki.com, a community forum website he founded. The site was ranked among the top 2,000 sites on Alexa back in 2003 and was acquired by StreetDirectory.com in 2005.

Douglas said that he leveraged his mIRC channels and bots to amass an initial group of community users. Knowing that most guys on the net are attracted by pictures of beautiful women (it’s the same now, isn’t it?), Douglas smartly persuaded some of the mIRC admin ladies (who were fortunately easy on the eyes) to post pictures of themselves on OhGenki. The guys enjoyed the pictures and the ladies enjoyed the compliments. The forum also had other general topics for discussion as well, and just before OhGenki was acquired, the site had generated over three million posts with over 20 million pageviews.

By 2006, Douglas was already a young millionaire. He could have retired. Bored with an aimless life, he went into stock trading and was partying frequently. Just one week before he turned 23, Douglas said he lost all the money he had ever made. He was on serious leverage across three different investment institutions with a peak of $50 million in equity trading exposure. He was supposedly bankrupt, but was saved by his father’s life savings. Douglas described that period of his life as a turning point, one which sternly reminded him not to be wasting his life. He vowed to improve people’s lives through technology.

Some screenshots from ShowNearby’s Android App

Broke and back at square one, Douglas didn’t give up. Determined, he started ShowNearby in 2007 and also two other web design and development firms in Indonesia and Singapore in subsequent years. All companies were later acquired by Yellow Pages but the comeback wasn’t easy either.

Today, Douglas angel invests and mentors budding startups from his Alma Mater Ngee Ann Polytechnic. He has also moved on to co-found VanityTrove with his lead architect from ShowNearby, Peng Kong Choy.

VanityTrove is a beauty service focusing on becoming a platform for women in Southeast Asia to discover beauty. He is 29 this year, but has gone through more than his share of ups and downs in his life as an entrepreneur. It will certainly be interesting to watch and see what the future has in store for him as well.

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Papa is a Very Vocal Photo-Sharing App, Wants to be ‘Instagram With Voice’

What comes after Instagram? What’s the next social sharing niche? A number of startups think that the next surge could be in apps that combine photos and voice, allowing users to talk – or sing, or record background noises – to accompany their photos. Comments can also be in audio form, saving you the hassle of typing out a response. One of these is China’s Papa, which I tested out over the weekend.

Papa app – as with Japan’s much better named Voicepic – is hoping that smartphone users are tired of simple photo-sharing services. In China, popular ones include Tuding and Vida. And so Papa brings in the voice messaging element of hit apps like WeChat and Whatsapp, allowing people to narrate their images. If they want. The American photographer and artist Ansel Adams would not agree with this move; he once said:

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

Undeterred by Adams, I signed up for Papa (which has apps for iPhone and Android) using Sina Weibo third-party login and found that a few dozen of the people that I follow on Weibo were already active on the startup app. The main timeline/stream (pictured below) is reminiscent of Pinterest, showing who ‘hearted’ other posts. Once you click on one, the photo is enlarged, and there’ll either be a voice message or a text caption:

To post something, first snap a photo and then – a lot like sending a voice message – you can hold down the record button to capture your audio. I gave it a try myself, and shared the end result with folks on Weibo. The image gets nicely embedded in Sina Weibo if you choose to share it that way. But your Weibo followers will have to click the provided link to your Papa page to hear your vocal missive, as pictured here:

In the Papa app itself, the voice element can also be ignored. It’s up to you to decide if you’d like to spend an unrecoverable 32 seconds of your life listening to what I had to say in my first post to Papa. At least it’s less of an overt effort than is involved in video-sharing apps, which perhaps explains why video apps like Viddy and Socialcam – and their Chinese counterparts – have been such a let-down this year. At least with things like Papa and Voicepic, the photo is often enough to enjoy all by itself – which is not the case when sharing video.

Papa has a few celebrity users – thanks to its third-party support for posting to Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo – which will be a useful boost for the app as it grows. The hottest of these might be the actress Angela Baby (pictured below left), while the geekiest is the founder of Innovation Works, Kai-fu Lee, seen here in one of his own images:

Papa is not being incubated by Lee’s Innovation Works, but it’s a distinct possibility that it could be taken onboard if the founder thinks it has great potential. As I noted a couple of months ago when I first heard of the app, Papa has received angel investment from Xu Zhaojun, the creator of the Tumblr-like Diandian – and Diandian is backed by Innovation Works. I think it’s likely we’ll hear of some first-round funding for this pretty soon. That’s so long as Papa and Voicepic – and other “Instagram with voice” apps – aren’t torpedoed by Instagram itself rolling out audio comments.

Grab the apps for iPhone or Android from the Papa.me homepage.

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Smartfren partners with Viki to bring video access to 9.4M subscribers

Indonesian CDMA mobile operator Smartfren has revealed its partnership with international video portal Viki as part of their commitment to bring innovative value-added service (VAS) to their customer base of 9.4 million subscribers.

Besides Viki, Smartfren has also announced a tie-up with another company, VMS, to offer video messaging services to its users. In a press conference last week, the mobile company also threw in vouchers for online games and discount coupons valid at select merchants. Viki provides video-type content, such as animation, film, movie, TV series, and video clips, which also include subtitles in more than 150 languages — a service that hinges on its network of one million translators.

It features 10,000 hours of content, and has seen 8.5 million unique visitors with 36 million total visits per month. Netizens all over the world will be able to enjoy box office hits, Korean romantic drama series, concert performances, music videos, interview clips and K-Pop video clips, among others.

Through this partnership, Viki is now one of the pre-installed apps in Smartfren’s Android-based tablet and smartphone offerings. Not only that, Smartfren subscribers are entitled to enjoy Viki videos ahead of users from other operators, and they even get to view at faster rates, with the recommended 3.1 Mbps data plan.

Smartfren New VAS Press Conference – Q&A Session

This is actually Viki’s second alliance with Indonesia mobile operator after teaming-up with AXIS (PT. AXIS Telekom Indonesia) in late September. Explaining why Korean videos dominate the platform despite of its popularity across Asia and the rest of the world, Partnerships and Marketing Manager for Indonesia Dellawati Wijaya says that this is mostly due to founder JiWon Moon being Korean. Also, one of their strategic investors is SK Planet, a subsidiary of South Korea’s SK Telecom. Earlier this year they have inked a deal with music companies Warner and LOEN Entertainment, to feature video performances of Korean artists such as Brown Eyed Girls and Drunken Tiger.

Quite similar with Viki, free video broadcast service VMS is also available pre-installed in Smartfren’s Android mobile devices. It provides premium content ranging from news, entertainment, celebrity, religious, to comedy. Users are allowed to share high quality videos up to five minutes in length, create their own channel, upload the video they’ve created and share it with other members. Meanwhile, businesses can use this platform for mobile sales and marketing purposes, so they will be able to sell, promote, advertise, and survey through pull mobile database, push mass video and interactivity along with an analytics tool to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The online game junkies no longer need to buy their game credits, since they are now able to purchase it through top-up vouchers sold in 100,000 outlets across Indonesia. To date, the voucher is valid for 22 online games, while throughout the year the list is expected to hit 30. The mobile coupon service will allow subscribers get certain discounts from several merchants simply by sending SMS or scanning a QR Code, and then showing the particular SMS with coupon code inside. At the launch event, Herman Suharto, Smartfren’s m-commerce business development division head, admitted that VAS only contributes around 4% of their total revenue. However, the addition of new VAS is not primarily meant for revenue generation, but more as a move to build customer loyalty.

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SMS is not dead yet : Innoz reaches 1 billion queries milestone

Today, text messaging has turned 20 years old. The first message was sent by Neil Papworth, a programmer on December 3rd, 1992 and coincidentally, India based Innoz celebrates its billion query milestone today.

Started by Deepak Ravindran, who dropped out of Kannur University, LBS College of Engineering to start Innoz, the company has touched a milestone of one billion queries mark on its flagship product 55444 (120 million active users).

Innoz’s flagship product 55444 also known as SMSGyan is an offline search engine that allows its users to search the web by sending an SMS (read our first profiling of Innoz).

Users will receive a specific answer of 480 characters within seconds with an option of retrieving further information on the query, if required. Consumers can choose to get charged a rupee an SMS or an avid user may opt for a monthly or daily subscription.

In terms of  regional distribution, the queries predominantly come in from the South zone which accounts for 40% followed by the West zone at 25% with 20% and 15% from the East and North zone respectively.
These are mostly in Hinglish, Kannada, Tamil and other regional variations. Location based queries such as location of ATMs, restaurants, petrol bunks etc. topped the list of most searched on 55444, movie reviews and movie timings came in a close second followed by search on music information and lyrics

The company raised its last round of funding from Seedfund Advisors in May 2012.

Recommended Read: All about Innoz API.

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Ex Infosys top exec Subhash Dhar’s startup launches GudVille, a social network for giving [Interview]

Enterprise Nube, the “off the shelf” IT products startup founded by former Infosys top executive Subhash Dhar has launched its first product– Gudville, a social network for giving. On the outside, it looks like a simple social network where users can sign up and create causes, petitions, vote for them, donate or volunteer. But the clever part is where he bridges the social network with large corporations and their corporate social responsibility activities. The vision is to align sustainability and the laws of free market.

Subhash Dhar, CEO, Enterprise Nube

Gudville which was launched last month on Thanksgiving, is a place where people can sign up using Facebook, create and support causes. You could even donate (only in US for now) to your make your favorite cause a success. In an interview with NBW, Dhar shares his vision for the company and the future of enterprise software.
NBW: Why launch a site for giving and corporate social responsibility?

Dhar: We are moving to a more transparent world. What exists now was not built for transparency. It was built for a hierarchical world and we can’t stop all of that. The only way to be credible in this world is to be genuine. Unfortunately, the world we create relies on models that has become less than acceptable. For example companies have to mine, pollute the air, water and exploit natural resources. The world is in a boil. In this world or transparency, corporate social responsibility will always become a part of anyone who is big. Companies have become larger than countries in some cases so its natural that people will expect them to be socially responsible.

On the supply side, take the tax receipts of fortune 500 companies in the United States. About $20 bn- $25 bn is given away as tax benefits to them by the government on account of the social responsibility schemes the companies spend on. If you take all the companies together including individual contribution, it is much higher.

Usually, its seen as a tax saving measure and not as social responsibility. And even if companies are spending so much, it isn’t visible in peoples eye. Its probably time for that $25 billion to do the talking.

NBW: How does it work?

Dhar: We are not an ERP for giving. We look at what society values as giving and connect companies with what people care about. The network will capture causes of people and any individual can go and support a cause. Its enabled using a Facebook login and we can tell what people care about by looking at it. For the first time, we will have book keeping for causes. It will be a goodness database you can look at and say what good you did last year.

At the other end, we will look at what are the causes and direct companies to those causes. We believe that every individual has a cause and is willing to put their social equity on the line. We will have active citizenship. The person will feel better. The world will be a better place.

NBW: That’s the consumer story..How is it attractive for corporates?

Dhar: Its a wild vision but if you have to do something, it has to be something crazy. Lets say a company says that I don’t want to support a random cause. I want to support something that my employees care about. This will tell them what people care about. It will even tell companies what they should be building next.

There is something adversarial between the laws of free market and sustainability. But the sustainability idea can be in line with the laws of free market. Some kind of convergence between the two can be achieved if you get people to talk to the companies. Its kind of a long shot.

NBW: Whats the roadmap like?

Dhar: The next one year is all about focusing on the consumer. We will focus heavily on improving the product and adoption. Marketing will be a key aspect till we get a critical mass. The corporate side will begin in a small way. And then the next year, we will focus on the corporate side. This season it will be about pushing the numbers till virality sets in. Its been barely a week. We will begin with the US market to test. Main reason is that there are some legalities we need to deal with.

NBW: Whats happening to enterprise IT? What are the changes you see?

Dhar: There is a distinct shift from what enterprises used to value in IT and what enterprises value in IT now. That’s reflecting in budget allocation and the models they engage with. IT budgets are not centralised as they used to be. It affects the models that business will accept. The pay as you go model is very strong now. IT departments would like more a-la-carte services to pick and choose from. If you put it all together, the enterprise is really looking for ready to use solutions and pay ideally on usage basis. That is to shift cap-ex from the customer to the vendor.

From a technology standpoint, enterprises are more and more interfacing with the customer’s technology and less with the customer directly. The Automatic Teller Machine is a classic example. Enterprise solutions need to talk to those powerful IT tools in the users hands. This will have profound implications on what enterprise solutions will look like. You will need to build ready to use pay as you go technology that will interface with the platforms that the consumer is on. For instance, you will have to interface with the consumers phones, his social media pages etc. This is a very important trend which will determine how enterprise solutions will be made.

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Smartfren partners with Viki to bring video access to 9.4M subscribers

Indonesian CDMA mobile operator Smartfren has revealed its partnership with international video portal Viki as part of their commitment to bring innovative value-added service (VAS) to their customer base of 9.4 million subscribers.

Besides Viki, Smartfren has also announced a tie-up with another company, VMS, to offer video messaging services to its users. In a press conference last week, the mobile company also threw in vouchers for online games and discount coupons valid at select merchants. Viki provides video-type content, such as animation, film, movie, TV series, and video clips, which also include subtitles in more than 150 languages — a service that hinges on its network of one million translators.

It features 10,000 hours of content, and has seen 8.5 million unique visitors with 36 million total visits per month. Netizens all over the world will be able to enjoy box office hits, Korean romantic drama series, concert performances, music videos, interview clips and K-Pop video clips, among others.

Through this partnership, Viki is now one of the pre-installed apps in Smartfren’s Android-based tablet and smartphone offerings. Not only that, Smartfren subscribers are entitled to enjoy Viki videos ahead of users from other operators, and they even get to view at faster rates, with the recommended 3.1 Mbps data plan.

Smartfren New VAS Press Conference – Q&A Session

This is actually Viki’s second alliance with Indonesia mobile operator after teaming-up with AXIS (PT. AXIS Telekom Indonesia) in late September. Explaining why Korean videos dominate the platform despite of its popularity across Asia and the rest of the world, Partnerships and Marketing Manager for Indonesia Dellawati Wijaya says that this is mostly due to founder JiWon Moon being Korean. Also, one of their strategic investors is SK Planet, a subsidiary of South Korea’s SK Telecom. Earlier this year they have inked a deal with music companies Warner and LOEN Entertainment, to feature video performances of Korean artists such as Brown Eyed Girls and Drunken Tiger.

Quite similar with Viki, free video broadcast service VMS is also available pre-installed in Smartfren’s Android mobile devices. It provides premium content ranging from news, entertainment, celebrity, religious, to comedy. Users are allowed to share high quality videos up to five minutes in length, create their own channel, upload the video they’ve created and share it with other members. Meanwhile, businesses can use this platform for mobile sales and marketing purposes, so they will be able to sell, promote, advertise, and survey through pull mobile database, push mass video and interactivity along with an analytics tool to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The online game junkies no longer need to buy their game credits, since they are now able to purchase it through top-up vouchers sold in 100,000 outlets across Indonesia. To date, the voucher is valid for 22 online games, while throughout the year the list is expected to hit 30. The mobile coupon service will allow subscribers get certain discounts from several merchants simply by sending SMS or scanning a QR Code, and then showing the particular SMS with coupon code inside. At the launch event, Herman Suharto, Smartfren’s m-commerce business development division head, admitted that VAS only contributes around 4% of their total revenue. However, the addition of new VAS is not primarily meant for revenue generation, but more as a move to build customer loyalty.

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