Appcelerator and RIM to reward mobile app developers for building on Titanium

Get rewarded for creating BlackBerry mobile apps through the cross-platform Titanium by Appcelerator.

Want to get rewarded for creating BlackBerry applications? Here’s some good news for mobile app developers. Research-in-Motion (RIM) and Appcelerator are collaborating to provide incentives such as financial rewards, free services and testing hardware for creating BlackBerry 10 applications. These incentives are applicable to Appcelerator’s ecosystem of over 390,000 developers. Using Titanium’s cross-platform capabilities, developers can build and port their apps to BlackBerry 10. Titanium for BlackBerry 10 will be available on December 7, 2012 in a pre-release version.

According to Appcelerator, those who standardize on the Titanium platform will be able to market their apps up to 70% faster and optimize business results. Appcelerator has demonstrated Titanium support for BlackBerry 10 at the recently-concluded BlackBerry Jam Asia in Bangkok, Thailand, where it hosted an on-site developer workshop. Not only that,  RIM will offer training and support through a webcast beginning the week of December 10, 2012.

The incentives are as follows:

• The first 100 developers will receive a BlackBerry® Dev Alpha test device, once their application has been submitted for review on the BlackBerry® World™ storefront
• Up to 10,000 developers will receive one year of free Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) and Analytics, once their app is approved and available for sale on BlackBerry World
• Applications that have been submitted can qualify for the BlackBerry 10k Developer Commitment

According to RIM, the Titanium (final code) support for BlackBerry 10 is expected to launch in the New Year, ahead of the BlackBerry 10 launch event, which is scheduled for January 30, 2013.

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Australia’s Flippa Helps You Flip Websites Quicker than Ever

While I’ve never ventured into the business of buying and flipping domain names or websites myself, it seems like an intriguing business. Ponder creative .com name, buy, flip, profit! Typically the process is not quite as simple, although an Australian company is aspiring to make it so. In fact, Flippa.com lets users sell not just domains, but entire websites, putting them up for auction to the highest bidder.

This week the Melbourne-based company launched a new listing system which it hopes will simplify the process of buying and selling even further. I gave it a quick run through to see how difficult it would be to create a sales listing (in my case a domain), and the survey-like process was indeed very easy [1]. Sellers can add a descriptive title, or opt to specify a buy-it-now price, which is a newly added feature.

If you’d like to see a more detailed overview of the process, you can check out Flippa’s video demo below. I’m told that the number of clicks needed to post has been reduced by 50 percent over the previous system.

Flippa claims to be the world’s top marketplace for buying and websites, with over $2 million in websites and domains traded every month. Among the more prominent properties to be sold on Flippa have been Facemash.com, and news site Inquisitr.com.

How is Flippa’s business in the Asia region so far? The company tells me that India is its third largest market, and they have lots of visitors from Indonesia as well, its sixth largest market.

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1. I weaseled out on the last step, as I don’t actually want to put any domain up for sale right now.  ↩

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Lessons from Enterprise Client Acquisition : Vagueness around Pricing/SLAs/Deliverable kills it all

Catering to enterprises has never given an entrepreneur a celebrity-like feeling opposed to when in the consumer Internet section. Although a prime reason for a B2B’s non-viral nature lies in its fundamental business model- they only cater to enterprises and not the mass; there’s an eternal issue that startups have scratched their heads for since the inception of this model- how exactly do these small guys acquire customers?

 There are some significantly sorrowful things about enterprise client acquisition scenario :

1. You just don’t know how many companies can be your target- Let’s be realistic. Despite all the targeting and segmentation efforts and all those biz fundamentals, its easy to get paralyzed while expanding your target market. This is especially true for horizontal offerings that span across verticals and where use cases are invented on the fly from client requirements.
2. Pull is not good enough- Sales cycles are pretty long and closing a deal tests all your patience and peace of mind. A bigger problem is that you cannot estimate the length of your sales cycle since each customer is different and they’re mostly beating around the bush. And if you’re small, you probably haven’t gathered the guts to say “I’ve had enough!”.
3. Big guys mostly like to deal with other big guys- A common sense approach after launch is to attack your existing network. But a common sense point to be noted is that the person on the other side is just an individual representing a big firm. So ultimately the whole deal goes back into the hands of a biggie and then oops! slips off…

Here are a few takeaways from our experience with the above points at PromptCloud while we sail the same boat.

1. Build a client base from small guys like you- Small guys will understand you better and you’ll not be wasting time convincing them that you’ll not die before they do. Moreover your business model doesn’t need to change and you’re fulfilling needs of anyone who comes your way. And not to forget the learnings you’re left with, irrespective of dealing with firms big or small.
   Caution- this is just a preliminary approach and does not necessarily mean you should continue catering to small firms because at some point esp. in a service model, they’re just overheads.

1. Branding via Word of Mouth- All of us know it. You just have to let your product/service quality speak for itself if someone has already heard about you instead of taking it up from square one. So do not hesitate to spread the word where you have a chance and let it play the game of randomness and coincidences apart from approaching it in a targeted way using referrals, press and social media esp. LinkedIn.
2. SEO is the meat- All of us hate unsolicited emails or calls. So call of the hour is inbound. It’s not just about ranking high on search engines but ranking high sensibly. It’s common to open hit#1 and be disappointed to only notice keywords that don’t serve anything (how much can a Google algo do?). SEO bolsters your brand and there’s definitely an impression made when you pop up in all related searches in addition to sounding useful. The best part here though is that leads that come on their own are more qualified to convert than those you reach out to.
3. Vagueness kills it all- DO NOT be vague about any of these- deliverables, price, SLA’s. These are things that should be told about upfront to avoid wasting both parties’ time. Customers want to set expectations and move from there as much as you’d not like to be misunderstood and later lose them out.
4. Be open for pilots- It’s always a smart move to invest in a free pilot because a) you’re giving a platform to your prospect to validate your product and b) action speaks louder than words in those outbound calls. Even the worst case (when the prospect doesn’t convert) isn’t as worse here because it’s magical how your knowledge base from a pilot you did for a prospect may be a year ago ends up being reused for a new prospect. On a side note, most of PromptCloud’s first meetings with leads have been after they were impressed with the POC. And better, we had to answer fewer or rather different questions and got rid of all the “salesy” talks.
5. Give long-term contracts a thought- Long-term contracts as well as annual billing plans make sense for most B2B’s who cater to the same set of customers regularly. It creates some affinity within the customer base for your product/service in addition to keeping those cash flows moving.

Note- As evident as it could be, all the points listed here are valid only if you clearly understand the problem you’re solving and have validated your product-market fit through multiple use cases.

What are your thoughts?

[Guest article contributed by Arpan Jha of PromptCloud Team.]

[Note from NextBigWhat Team: If you are a B2B startup willing to share your experience, insights - do write to us.]

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Komli Media Partners with Yoose to Serve Geo-targeted Ads

Komli Media has announced its second deal in the last five days, this time a sales partnership with Singapore-based hyperlocal mobile ad network Yoose. The deal will see Komli Media’s mobile division use Yoose’s geo-tagging advertising capability for the India and Southeast Asia market. Amit Bhartiya, the VP of Komli Media comments:

As leaders within the digital media advertising space across India and Southeast Asia, our objective is to add a hyperlocal offering into our mix that ensures setting best-practice standards for mobile geo-targeting and engagement, both for our clients and their consumers. We consider the Yoose partnership to be fundamentally important in achieving this and are confident of the significant value this will bring to advertisers across India and Southeast Asia.

Yoose makes use of the geotagged locations shared on mobile phones, allowing ads shown on mobile phones to be more relevant to the users’ location, such as advertising for a fruit vendor 500 meters away. Yoose’s mobile ad feature will also help strengthen Komli’s recent ad sales partnership with Twitter, which was announced last week.

For more information about how Yoose works, you can check out the interview video below with CEO Christian Geissendoerfer.

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Yahoo’s Jacqueline Reses Takes Seat on Alibaba Board

Yahoo’s Jacqueline Reses

China’s biggest e-commerce company, Alibaba, has just announced that Yahoo’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) Jacqueline Reses has joined Alibaba Group’s board of directors. After this summer’s partial stake buy-back by the Chinese firm, Yahoo still owns approximately 23 percent of Alibaba.

Reses joins founder Jack Ma, CFO Joe Tsai, and Softbank’s (TYO:9984) Masayoshi Son as one of four directors on the board. She takes the seat of Yahoo’s Tim Morse at the table.

Ma said in today’s announcement:

[This] underscores Alibaba’s strong relationship with Yahoo. We are pleased to welcome such an experienced and respected executive like Jackie, who brings a wealth of strategic insight and operating experience to the Alibaba board.

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Pink Dollar aims to end gay discrimination by promoting Hong Kong’s LGBT-friendly businesses

Paul Ramscar got a strange look from a sales staff when he once entered a jewelry store with his boyfriend. He could tell that the sales person behaved awkwardly — a reaction he didn’t get when he entered the same shop alone.

While Hong Kong is one of the most gay-friendly places in Asia, gay discrimination is still prevalent. That personal encounter was one of the things that prompted Paul to create Pink Dollar, a mobile app that serves as a directory of LGBT-friendly businesses.

Sounds straightforward, but there’s more to it. One challenge Pink Dollar faces is to determine which businesses are safe zones for gays.

“Some of them just want to ride on the pink dollar. We want to be careful about who we add onto platform,” said Paul, who decided to leave behind his 20-year banking career to start the new business.

Paul assesses each establishment for gay-friendliness by sending out mystery customers. The app also relies on user ratings and reviews to ensure that the businesses live up to their billing. The end goal is to create a directory of places that LGBTs can go to without facing harassment or discrimination.

The app launched on the iPhone on 4 October, and has since listed over a hundred establishments, all of them paying Pink Dollar a subscription fee of between HKD500 (USD65) and HKD2,000 (USD258). The startup is self-funded at the moment, and relies on outsourcing for app development. Some of the partners that have come on board include Barclays, Din Tai Fung, and Porsche Center Hong Kong.

Although Pink Dollar is still in the early stages, it is moving beyond being a simple business listing app. It is leapfrogging into ecommerce, introducing mobile coupons that users can utilize with partner merchants. It has even organized private shopping events, such as one with bedlinen retailer Burnt Orange which had a turnout of over 50 people.

Pink Dollar is also working on Android and Mandarin versions of the app. It’s also building a rewards scheme that incentivizes users to leave ratings and reviews. He will soon give out stickers with the Pink Dollar logo for establishments to display on their storefront windows.

Paul is also looking at Singapore as a potential market to expand into.

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Get home appliances repaired with Viyanta – promises flat 50% off on service charge on missed deadlines

While purchasing consumer electronics products is easy with offline as well as online stores , finding hassle-free and quick repairing service is still a distant dream. I had a painful reminiscent and hassles of repairing a food processing unit, the brand’s own servicing arm took more than a fortnight to fix the unit.

There has been real dearth of  trustworthy servicing brands which provide quality and professional repair services for consumer electronic products. Typically,  consumers have to either rely on time taking brand service centres or on the local technician. Brands’ service centres not only take a lot of time, consumers also need to drop and pick the product. Meanwhile, local technicians are often not skilled enough to repair all kinds of appliances and to handle complicated repairs.

Here comes the Delhi based Viyanta.com, Viyanta is a multi channel [web,phone and via collection centres] platform which offers electronics repair, maintenance and installation services of consumer appliances. Currently, the platform provides service in Delhi [NCR] region with quick turnaround time [within 72 hours].

Viyanta repairs appliances ranging from small appliance like dry iron to all kinds of LCDs / LEDs / Plasma TVs or any brand of refrigerators or A/Cs and provide Annual Maintenance Contracts (“AMC”) to all kinds of appliances which the company repairs.

How does it work?
Consumers can reach Viyanta through three mediums: Online, phone and through collection centres. While online users have to raise their request through Viyanta’s website, telephonically they have to dial 011-42754422. On offline front,, Viyanta plans to set up collection centres (registered franchise), so that consumers can visit Viyanta’s centres (coming up) to drop and collect (repaired  ones) their appliances.

Consumers can track their request online with the help of unique job id and claims to provide 100% on-time commitment and if it fails to meet the deadline, the company offers flat 50% discount on its service charges.
Founded by IIT Delhi graduates – Atul Monga, Vipul Singh, Vishesh Kumar and Amit Roy Chowdhary, currently Viyanta has team of 18 full time employees including 12 part timers. Part time employees consist of people primarily for pick-up & delivery, marketing and other technical freelancers for seasonal repairs.

Speaking about Viyanta’s hiring policy, Atul Monga, Director & CEO of the company said “We mainly employ all our technicians in-house as this ensures us to maintain quality of our services. however, we also have visiting and contractual / per call technical staff for non-regular or seasonal repairs like that of A/Cs or Geysers”. The mixed structure of workforce helps Viyanta to check quality and availability of technical force as well as being a start-up the structure equips them to keep tab on expenditure.

The company aims to become India’s largest repair and mantenance services provider for both retail and corporate clients. As far as  future plans are concerned, Monga mentions “We started a month back with initial launch of our operations in Delhi / NCR, very soon we aim to start our pan-India operations and will launch Mumbai operations by February 2013”.
At present the venture is being bootstrapped by founders. Being a cash rich business and a good initial response from its customers “there is no immediate funding requirements. However, we are open for funding proposals” added Monga.

If you are in Delhi ( NCR), give spin to Viyanta’s service and let us know the feedback.

Recommended Read : Meet Chachii, the virtual aunty to get your chores done

Funding: Seedfund Invests in Jeeves Consumer Services, third party after sales services company

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Evolving at the Speed of Light, 2 Chinese Photo-Sharing Apps Add Voice Comments

That was fast. Just a few weeks after some ‘Instagram with voice’ startup apps emerged into the limelight, two of China’s established photo-sharing services have already rolled out voice comments. Tuding has launched this new element to its iPhone app this week, while Vida has just done so this morning on both iOS and Android.

This quick evolution for Tuding and Vida suggests that audio annotations might be the next big thing in social photo taking. It remains to be seen if Instagram will go this route. But Chinese startups tend to move a lot faster than those in Silicon Valley, so it’s no surprise that the duo are way ahead of Instagram on this.

Voice comments and narration are central to two promising apps that we looked at very recently: Voicepic from Japan, and Papa from China. But their speciality is proving to be easy to copy and implement pretty quickly for their rivals.

(Read: 5 of the Best Chinese Photo-Sharing Apps)

Vida and Tuding have put the audio into action in a very similar way to the early starters, right down to the ‘play’ button with the number of seconds written on it. But while Tuding also supports vocal comments from your buddies in response to your photo, Vida doesn’t.

Tuding is a rare overseas success story in China, being made by Finland’s GeoSentric (HEL:GEO1V), and which passed four million users this time last year – but no newer stats are available. Vida is a newer startup that launched at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing event.

Snag the updated apps from the homepages of Tuding or Vida.

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DailyDose: Son rises at Samsung, Lee Jae Yong named Vice Chairman

Apple’s fuel cell farm is getting bigger

Apple has decided to double the size of its fuel cell project at its data center project in North Carolina. Bloom Energy, is installing 50 Bloom boxes at the site to produce 10 MW of electricity. eBay has a similar fuel cell farm. The startup founded by India-born K R Sridhar, formerly of Nasa had hired ex Wipro Joint CEO Girish Parajnpe to head international business. [Source]

Google makes a YouTube for iPad app

Earlier, Apple dropped YouTube app from default inclusions in iOS6 and Google only made a new one for iPhone and iPod touch. [Source]  Google has also launched Gmail 2.0 On iOS With New Design, Support For Multiple Accounts, Calendar And Google+ Integration. [Source]

Succession Plan at electronics giant Samsung

Samsung Electronics promoted Lee Jae Yong to Vice Chairman, putting him a step closer to his father as the head of the company. The worlds largest maker of television and mobile phones saw its shares rise .2 % in Seol trading (thats 35 % gain this year). 44 year old Lee is in a stronger position to take over from his father who was Chairman for 25 years at company. Lee is currently the chief operating officer and president at the electronics major. [Source]

Pandora’s earnings

The Internet radio company beat expectations in the third quarter of 2013. Revenues were up 60 % to $120 million and net income was at $2.1 million. Predicts lower than expected revenues for the fourth quarter.  Advertising revenue was $106.3 million, a 61 percent year-over-year increase. Subscription and other revenue was $13.7 million, a 52 percent year-over-year increase.[Source]

The messaging maps market

[Source]

Ex-Trader Arrested After $1 Billion Trade in Apple

A former trader at Rochdale Securities has been arrested and charged with fraud after his well-publicized purchase of $1 billion worth of Apple stock, a trade that put the firm in financial peril.[Source]

NASA announces plans for new $1.5 billion Mars rover

Using spare parts and mission plans developed for NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, the space agency says it can build and launch a new rover in 2020 and stay within current budget guidelines.[Source]

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YOOSE and Komli strikes ad sales partnership for Southeast Asia and India

Mobile ad network, YOOSE, partners with Komli Mobile to offer brands and agencies with hyper-local and rich media advertising capabilities in Southeast Asia and India.

YOOSE today announced a new sales partnership with Komli Mobile, a division of Komli Media. The global hyper-local and rich media mobile ad network will see this partnership focused initially on Southeast Asia and India and will augment Komli’s existing mobile advertising services for brands and agencies.

The YOOSE hyper-local network will offer Komli’s advertisers access to a network reach of 1.44 billion monthly ad impressions in Southeast Asia alone. Komli recently announced its exclusive partnership with Twitter to bring its suite of Promoted Product to Southeast Asia. Komli also has existing partnerships with top publishers such as Facebook and Bloomberg.

In the press release, Amit Bhartiya, Vice President of Komli Mobile said, “As leaders within the digital media advertising space across India and South East Asia, our objective is to add a hyper-local offering into our mix that ensures setting best-practice standards for mobile geo-targeting and engagement, both for our clients and their consumers. We consider the YOOSE partnership to be fundamentally important in achieving this and are confident of the significant value this will bring to advertisers across India and South East Asia.”

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China Mobile Planning Own Line of Mobile Phones; Plus CEO Talks Apple Plans

This morning, China Mobile CEO Li Yue announced that the telecom provider is planning to launch its own line of branded mobile phones. Li also said that the company will “definitely” continue and strengthen its work on a partnership with Apple to officially sell the iPhone. At present, China Mobile does not sell phones of its own, and it is China’s only major telecom provider not to offer the iPhone (although many China Mobile users do use jailbroken iPhones on the company’s 2G network).

If you’re excited about the Apple news, don’t be: Li’s statement is pretty vague and the company has previously said quite clearly that it won’t offer the iPhone until 2014. The news about a China Mobile-branded line of phones is more interesting, though. Li asserted that this would not harm competition in the mobile space and that China Mobile would pursue a “Wal-Mart” model of sorts, selling its own phones alongside the handsets of other brands in its stores.

That announcement, too, is a bit premature, as Li said the company is ramping up its plans but is still in negotiations with supplier factories. That process takes time, as does design, manufacturing, and marketing, so I wouldn’t expect to see China Mobile handsets sitting on store shelves any time too soon.

It’s also interesting that China Mobile is making a move into hardware around the same time as SARFT is making a move into China Mobile’s territory: telecommunications services. This is almost certainly a coincidence, but it’s a coincidence I think is worth noting. It will be interesting to see if any of China’s other telecom providers are considering similar approaches.

[via TechWeb]

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