DeNA rebrands to a friendlier and fun image with new logo and identity

Global Internet comapany, DeNA, rebrands to unite all its global offices and highlight its divers product offerings.

DeNA, the Japanese mobile Internet service company, today unveiled its new corporate logo and brand identity in a bid to unite all DeNA owned companies worldwide. The new corporate logo is in line with the company’s corporate slogan: “Delight and Impact the World”.

The initial letter “D” in the logo features a smiley emoticon, symbolising the company’s pursuit of delighting customers. The new logo’s playful font represents the company’s commitment to be an approachable, friendly and fun company for its stakeholders around the world.

Beginning today, DeNA’s subsidiaries around the world will be uniformly branded as “DeNA” followed by the name of the city where the office is located. Previously known ngmoco office in San Francisco will now be referred to as DeNA San Francisco. Subsidiaries’ legal names and first-party game studio brands such as ngmoco, Gameview and Scattered Entertainment will remain unchanged.

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Spotted: 5 Interesting projects on Spark the Rise Contest

Spark the Rise is an initiative by the Mahindra group, which dabbles in everything ranging from the financial credit for the rural poor to raising eco-friendly urban apartments, but is best known for its automobile business.  Spark The Rise, the online ecosystem which helps change makers from all over the country to connect and collaborate on the best ideas that impact the society has announced the results of their third round of voting.  The shortlisted teams will now be competing for the final prize.

We bring you five awesome projects we spotted on the program.

1.    Recommerce Hub

Team: Srikanth Ch and Rajesh Jampana
Idea: The for profit  venture aims to reduce the e-waste landfills in India by  providing cash incentives to the users for selling old, used and second hand mobiles on the platform.
Location: Currently operating out of and in Bangalore city only. Utilize the Grant: The team would spend the grant on hiring web developers and mobile technicians along with procuring an office space and spending the money towards marketing.

2.    Divya Jyothi Charitable Trust

Team: M A Shivprakash
Idea: Providing a pickup and drop facility for the severely disabled students, In the phase on they aim to provide the disabled school students followed by the same for the degree students of the locality.
Location: Mysore, Karnataka
Utilize the Grant: The grant will be used to fund buses for helping the disabled students along with boosting the research in technology driven solutions for the problems faced by the disabled students in transportation.

3.    India Shops for Change

Team: Seth Petchers
Idea: Shop for Change audits farmer groups and buyers against social and environmental standards to ensure that farmers are not cheated, are provided with training to increase production and lower costs, and can negotiate prices as a group.
Location: Mumbai with visits to farmer groups in rural India
Utilize the Grant: The funding would be used by them to fund the field visits to the farmers, support business development staff and a marketing campaign for the farmer’s produce.

4.    Knowledge Point

Team: Manoj Soni, Kirti Soni and Ashish Katakwar
Idea: Knowledge Point aims to increase the literacy rate among the poor children especially those suffering from the dual challenges of being below the poverty line and socially backward groups.
Location: Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh
Utilize the Grant: To provide the basic health facilities to the students and raise health awareness. Incentivizing the best students and directors from the Knowledge Point community to create positive action chain.

5.    Rosi Foundation

Team: S Palanivel, Ms.R.Mangayarkarasi and Babu Rajendran
Idea: Lemongrass oil unit for remote forest dwellers who are living in the forest without any livelihood or food security. Rural based business development, women involvement and environment protection will be achieved
Location: Sirumalai and Palani Hills

Utilize the Grant: 10 lemon grass units would be established using the funds along with money required for transportation, training the beneficiaries and setting up the infrastructure.

We wish all of these projects best of luck for their ventures and hope they achieve their true potential and help the community.

Voting for these startups are open here.

* Disclaimer: Mahindra Rise is a sponsor at NextBigWhat.com.

Related posts:

1. 5 Innovative Ideas spotted at Spark the Rise Contest : Piezo Electric floor tiles, Regenerative braking [and more]
2. Mahindra’s second Spark the Rise challenge opens for entry till December 2012
3. Mahindra’s Spark the Rise Round 2 winners announced: sms4blood, ERC-eye care center [and more]

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DeNA Gets a Playful Rebranding, Plans to Release Social Music App in Japan

Recently we looked back on what was a pretty busy year for Japan’s DeNA (TYO:2432). The internet and social games company has expanded aggressively both at home and abroad. And today the company kicked off 2013 with a few interesting changes, including a brand new logo as you can see on the right, and a new slogan “Delight and Impact the World.” This means that DeNA’s global subsidiaries will uniformly referred to by their region name, i.e. ngmoco in the US will be called DeNA San Francisco. You can see a list of all locations here.

Included in this rebranding are its Bidders.jp e-commerce service, which will now be called DeNA Shopping. It now lives on a new URL, at dena-ec.com. DeNA’s Skygate travel service will subsequently be known as DeNA Travel.

The company also unveiled plans for a new social music called Groovy. It will be available in Japan for both iOS and Android. This comes as a result of DeNA acquiring an existing music app, Discodeer, from Japanese tech company United. Launched in December of 2011, that app once held the top spot in the music category on the Apple App Store, passing one million downloads in its first four months, and 1.5 million after 10 months. DeNA says that it will add social networking and music distribution features and launch the app within the quarter.

More than 20 content partners on board for Groovy, including Sony Music, Universal Music, and EMI Music Japan, and will feature over a million songs. It remains to be seen exactly how the app will be a social one, but we look forward to finding out.

5 Million Downloads for Comm ¶

DeNA also announced that its Comm mobile messenger service has surpassed the 5 million downloads milestone, which is pretty impressive considering that the service only just launched back in October. The app was promoted heavily in Japan with television ads, and that strategy appears to have paid off.

Today’s press conference (in Japanese) can be replayed via DeNA’s Ustream channel.

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Sina Weibo opens English interface for SE Asia users

Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo has launched an English interface. Is this a hint of bigger things ahead for Sina?

Twitter may be the dominant microblogging service in countries like Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. But in mainland China, where Twitter is filtered out by the so-called Great Firewall of China, the service may reportedly have only less than 20,000 users out of its 200 million active users worldwide.

In China, Weibo services are all the craze. Sina Weibo, for instance, one of the larger weibo services (“weibo” translates to micro-blog), has about 400 million registered users. Some of this user base is likely to be scattered across the globe, with Chinese users abroad using the service to get in touch with folks back home.

Sina is opening up its service to more users, particularly by offering English as a language option. This move is likely to stave off competition from rival Tencent Weibo, which launched an English veresion in September 2011. Launching in English also lets non-Chinese speaking users explore the service, which is richer in features as compared to the very spartan Twitter.

Sina is reportedly making its English interface available to users across South East Asia, although the English translation is confirmed to be accessible from the U.S. and South Africa.

On a lighter note, Hollywood actor Brad Pitt has just joined Sina Weibo. His first weibo said “It is the truth. Yup, I’m coming.” The cryptic message caused some stir and confusion, given that the star is being banned from entering China since participating in a Tibet-related film in 1997. His post has since been deleted, but we wonder whether the timing of Sina’s launching its English-language interface could be related. Other western celebrities on Sina Weibo include Tom Cruise, Emma Watson and rock band Radiohead.

Interested in tweeting — or rather weiboing — with friends in English? Head on to Sina Weibo now.

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Sina Weibo opens English interface for SE Asia users

Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo has launched an English interface. Is this a hint of bigger things ahead for Sina?

Twitter may be the dominant microblogging service in countries like Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. But in mainland China, where Twitter is filtered out by the so-called Great Firewall of China, the service may reportedly have only less than 20,000 users out of its 200 million active users worldwide.

In China, Weibo services are all the craze. Sina Weibo, for instance, one of the larger weibo services (“weibo” translates to micro-blog), has about 400 million registered users. Some of this user base is likely to be scattered across the globe, with Chinese users abroad using the service to get in touch with folks back home.

Sina is opening up its service to more users, particularly by offering English as a language option. This move is likely to stave off competition from rival Tencent Weibo, which launched an English veresion in September 2011. Launching in English also lets non-Chinese speaking users explore the service, which is richer in features as compared to the very spartan Twitter.

Sina is reportedly making its English interface available to users across South East Asia, although the English translation is confirmed to be accessible from the U.S. and South Africa.

On a lighter note, Hollywood actor Brad Pitt has just joined Sina Weibo. His first weibo said “It is the truth. Yup, I’m coming.” The cryptic message caused some stir and confusion, given that the star is being banned from entering China since participating in a Tibet-related film in 1997. His post has since been deleted, but we wonder whether the timing of Sina’s launching its English-language interface could be related. Other western celebrities on Sina Weibo include Tom Cruise, Emma Watson and rock band Radiohead.

Interested in tweeting — or rather weiboing — with friends in English? Head on to Sina Weibo now.

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Managed Marketplace ShopClues eyes Rs 350 cr sales in 2013

Gurgaon-based Clues Network Pvt Ltd, which runs the horizontal e-commerce marketplace ShopClues,  clocked Rs. 100 crores in gross merchandise value of sales in financial year 2012 (January to December) and is targeting to close Rs. 350 crore in 2013, top company officials told NBW.

The company which has raised $6 million in two rounds of funding, claims that it grew 90X in 2012 and shipped around 750 thousands (7.5 lakh) orders in 2012.

Sandeep Aggarwal, Founder ShopClues said “ We are targeting to ship 3 million orders in 2013 with 25,000 active merchants on ShopClues platform”. Currently, the company has 7,000 active merchants on its platform.

During an earlier interaction with NBW, Aggarwal mentioned that ShopClues is making positive gross margin in every transaction and projected to become first eCommerce company in India to achieve profitability by the end of 2013.

In terms of traffic, presently, ShopClues is ranked at 126th position in India, while Tradus  and SnapDeal are at 100 and 61 respectively. As far as Alexa ranking is concerned, over the past 11 months ShopClues has grown around 55X

SchopClues traffic compared to Snapdeal and Tradus on Alexa

The average ticketsize in electronic category (mobile, laptops, tablets etc) is around Rs 1450 and Rs. 850 in non-electronics (fashion and lifestyles) category for ShopClues.

Speaking about margins for the two categories, Aggarwal said “We typically earn 4 to 9% in electronics category and 8 to 12% in non electronics category”. Nearly 60% of ShopClues’s overall sales come from non electronics category.

Unlike other ecommerce companies, ShopClues was not the part of Great Online Festival (GOSF) hosted by Google India and ran its own parallel 12-12-12 festival. On the occasion, Aggarwal claimed that  order was up by 325% with north of 150 thousands visitors on the day.

ShopClues plans to raise growth capital this year to ramp up technology and team size, said Aggarwal.

Related posts:

1. With frugality and deep data analysis, ShopClues claims to become profitable in 2013 [first for an ecommerce company?]
2. On ShopClues funding : “The $4mn Series A round was closed in Jan 2012″ [Founder, Sandeep Aggarwal]
3. Report: Mobile sales in India to reach 251 mn units in 2013 [Lenovo Beats HP and Jockeying for No 1 position]

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LinkedIn reaches 200M members worldwide; Indonesia 3rd fastest growing country

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network on the Internet, has reached 200M members, it announced today. It claims that one new member joins the social network every 2 seconds, a staggering number that adds up to about 15.7M a year. Indeed, since November 1, 2012, it has added around 13M members.

The company adds that it now has about 160M monthly unique visitors, making it the 23rd most visited web property in the world, according to comScore. 37M of LinkedIn’s users come from Asia-Pacific, with Indonesia becoming the 3rd fastest growing country in terms of members on LinkedIn.

The post LinkedIn reaches 200M members worldwide; Indonesia 3rd fastest growing country appeared first on SGE.

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[Events] Start-Up@Singapore presents Start-Up Dynamo!

Do you live and breathe entrepreneurship? Are you at your constructive best while surrounded by start-up enthusiasts like yourself? If yes, then look no further than S@S’s upcoming 3-day workshop, Start-Up Dynamo.

Start-Up Dynamo is a lean start-up and growth hacking workshop designed to put your start-up idea to the test. Either come with a new idea and have your idea validated, or with an existing product and optimize for user and customer acquisition.

We expect that you would have already thought through the ideas, and have already started working on parts of it. Through the workshop you will focus on the most critical parts of your business and work towards building the parts that have the most impact. Coordinating the workshop with us is Ryan Lou, an NOC alumnus who has run start-up validation workshops since 2009 and was a founding organizer of the first ever Lean Start-up Machine in South America.

Sign up as a group or as an individual and get ready for an intense and rewarding weekend where you put your idea to the test, talk to people on the streets, put prototypes in front of customers and get ahead on your idea with support from mentors. The most promising team will also stand a chance to walk away with S$500 as well as gain direct entry into the Start-Up@Singapore Biz Venture Challenge semi-finals to win a further S$15,000!

Event details:

• Start: Friday, 25 January, 2013 06:00 p.m.
• End: Sunday, 27 January, 2013 06:00 p.m.
• Venue : SCAPE, HubQuarters on 4 (Level 4)
• Register here
• Discount Code :Discounts for group purchases and for students
• Organizer : Start-Up@Singapore

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[Events] Start-Up@Singapore presents Start-Up Dynamo!

Do you live and breathe entrepreneurship? Are you at your constructive best while surrounded by start-up enthusiasts like yourself? If yes, then look no further than S@S’s upcoming 3-day workshop, Start-Up Dynamo.

Start-Up Dynamo is a lean start-up and growth hacking workshop designed to put your start-up idea to the test. Either come with a new idea and have your idea validated, or with an existing product and optimize for user and customer acquisition.

We expect that you would have already thought through the ideas, and have already started working on parts of it. Through the workshop you will focus on the most critical parts of your business and work towards building the parts that have the most impact. Coordinating the workshop with us is Ryan Lou, an NOC alumnus who has run start-up validation workshops since 2009 and was a founding organizer of the first ever Lean Start-up Machine in South America.

Sign up as a group or as an individual and get ready for an intense and rewarding weekend where you put your idea to the test, talk to people on the streets, put prototypes in front of customers and get ahead on your idea with support from mentors. The most promising team will also stand a chance to walk away with S$500 as well as gain direct entry into the Start-Up@Singapore Biz Venture Challenge semi-finals to win a further S$15,000!

Event details:

• Start: Friday, 25 January, 2013 06:00 p.m.
• End: Sunday, 27 January, 2013 06:00 p.m.
• Venue : SCAPE, HubQuarters on 4 (Level 4)
• Register here
• Discount Code :Discounts for group purchases and for students
• Organizer : Start-Up@Singapore

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Things to watch out for when shopping online

Are you aware of online threats when shopping online? Unfortunately, not many of us are.

Many Singaporeans perform online shopping and according to a recent PayPal research, Singapore online shopping market is estimated to hit S$4.4 billion in 2015. This significant figure definitely draws cybercriminals who are looking to steal identities and hijack online accounts. As the growing trend changes, so are the tricks and scams done by these lawbreakers. Many Singaporeans are not aware of these dangers in online shopping and hijackers take advantage of their lack of online safety knowledge. This misdemeanour can be prevented if shoppers are savvy enough to avoid falling into their traps. So what are some of the cunning ways that these hijackers do to steal your info?

First, do know that these cybercriminals are motivated financially by making you pay for goods that you will never receive. Worse, they steal your credit card details and authentication details for their own gain. Secondly, the misconception about targeting individual is invalid as they target big organizations and popular websites as well to advertise their goods and services but upon payment, nothing gets delivered. Phishing emails and installing malicious software are their weapons. Unwary users key in their personal information in e-commerce sites and that is how their identities get stolen. This is a worrying issue as most shoppers aren’t aware and cybercriminals are most likely to succeed in this scam. Thankfully, as of now, it is safer to shop on a smartphone or tablet as there is less malware and fewer attackers targeting users on these platforms. Nevertheless, with the advancing technology, this problem can also creep to these platform in a few years time.

Knowing that there are cybercriminals out there should put us on alert mode whenever we perform any sort of online transaction. How can we stay safe? Always do a background check on the websites before purchasing any goods. It is better to be safe than sorry. Also, a personal tip includes googling for reviews done by other shoppers on the websites. Sometimes, all it takes is a little patience and effort to read through those reviews to ensure scamming isn’t involved. Do your online shopping wisely.

Source : Singapore Business Review

Image Credits : Quaero

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Things to watch out for when shopping online

Are you aware of online threats when shopping online? Unfortunately, not many of us are.

Many Singaporeans perform online shopping and according to a recent PayPal research, Singapore online shopping market is estimated to hit S$4.4 billion in 2015. This significant figure definitely draws cybercriminals who are looking to steal identities and hijack online accounts. As the growing trend changes, so are the tricks and scams done by these lawbreakers. Many Singaporeans are not aware of these dangers in online shopping and hijackers take advantage of their lack of online safety knowledge. This misdemeanour can be prevented if shoppers are savvy enough to avoid falling into their traps. So what are some of the cunning ways that these hijackers do to steal your info?

First, do know that these cybercriminals are motivated financially by making you pay for goods that you will never receive. Worse, they steal your credit card details and authentication details for their own gain. Secondly, the misconception about targeting individual is invalid as they target big organizations and popular websites as well to advertise their goods and services but upon payment, nothing gets delivered. Phishing emails and installing malicious software are their weapons. Unwary users key in their personal information in e-commerce sites and that is how their identities get stolen. This is a worrying issue as most shoppers aren’t aware and cybercriminals are most likely to succeed in this scam. Thankfully, as of now, it is safer to shop on a smartphone or tablet as there is less malware and fewer attackers targeting users on these platforms. Nevertheless, with the advancing technology, this problem can also creep to these platform in a few years time.

Knowing that there are cybercriminals out there should put us on alert mode whenever we perform any sort of online transaction. How can we stay safe? Always do a background check on the websites before purchasing any goods. It is better to be safe than sorry. Also, a personal tip includes googling for reviews done by other shoppers on the websites. Sometimes, all it takes is a little patience and effort to read through those reviews to ensure scamming isn’t involved. Do your online shopping wisely.

Source : Singapore Business Review

Image Credits : Quaero

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Gimmie Funding! Singapore-based Loyalty Service Raises $520,000 for Asia Expansion

Singapore-based loyalty service provider Gimmie has announced that it has received S$639,000 (about US$520,000) from various investors, led by WaveMaker Labs in partnership with the Singapore National Research Foundation. This round of funding will be used to help Gimmie expand to other regions in Asia.

Gimmie’s CEO David Ng explained in the announcement that the company’s first area of expansion will be Indonesia. Helping them make a push in that country will be Jakarta’s Ideosource, which also participated in this funding round.

As I understand it, Gimmie differs from other loyalty programs used by mobile publishers in that it doesn’t require you to leave the application to be rewarded. Instead, users can be rewarded for criteria such as their playing time, reaching new levels, or subscribing to certain content.

WaveMaker’s managing partner Debneel Mukherjee explained that the recent mobile boom in the region means that the market is ripe for a service provider like Gimmie:

With the mobile internet penetration poised for a quantum leap, across Asia, in the next few years, Gimmie is well placed to harness this untapped opportunity and become the leading provider of customized loyalty solutions for digital media businesses, in the region.

You can learn a little more about Gimmie in their fun promo video below.

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In less than a year, LinkedIn grows nearly 30% in India, its second largest user base

Professional networking site LinkedIn grew its number of users in India by nearly 30% in less than a year making India its second largest user base worldwide.

LinkedIn announced on its blog that they crossed 200 million users worldwide. The United States, with 74 million users contributed to the largest number of LinkedIn users followed by India, where it has 18 million users.

In April, the company had about 14 million users in India which implies a growth of nearly 30% in about 8 months.

Earlier this week, the company promoted its India manager Hari V Krishnan to head its operations in Asia Pacific and Japan and appointed Nishant K Rao as its new country manager.

Image: LinkedIn

For the US listed company, India with over 80 million white collar professionals is quite obviously an important market. Linkedin is growing fast on the mobile in China, Brazil, Portugal, India and Italy and the company opened its first development center outside US in Bangalore, India.

Emerging countries like India, China, Brazil, and Russia are large markets for most aspiring global companies. However, for web companies, China and Russia are tough markets to crack. China, dominated by companies like the Alibaba Group and Baidu remains a challenge to web companies due to various factors such as language and regulation. Russia poses similar challenges.

India, however, is an easier place to tap users because of its largely English speaking Internet population. The country, with over 120 million Internet users, is one of the largest Internet populations in the world.

Twitter, which has over 500 million users, has more than 18 million users from India, making it the 6th largest user base for Twitter. For Facebook, India is the third largest user base with over 60 million users from the subcontinent.

Recommended read: India Internet 2012- What world’s 3rd largest Internet population is like

Related posts:

1. India Online Report –47mn User Base ( 6% Drop in Internet users), Cyber cafe user base shrinks
2. Weekly Recap – Kindla DX in India, LinkedIn user base in India, Startups [and more]
3. Facebook reaches 12 million user base in India

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