Now With New Parents, China’s Redbaby Targets $500M in Sales This Year

In September of last year, the once highly lauded online store Redbaby, which specializes in baby and maternity items, was bought for the bargain price of $66 million by one of China’s top retail chains. It was a hasty exit for Redbaby as it struggled to stay alive in China’s costly and fierce B2C e-tailing sector. Now Redbaby’s new parents, Suning (SHE:002024), are sustaining the site while also gradually integrating its babycare products into Suning.com’s own fast-growing online mall.

Now Redbaby is looking to the future and has set its sights on 3 billion RMB (nearly $500 million) in sales revenue by the end of 2013. That’s three times higher than the site’s figure for 2011.

So, after a tough couple of years that culminated in its apparently life-saving acquisition, Redbaby CEO Li Bin told Chinese media yesterday that he’s very optimistic of solid growth, with one million new users added in the previous quarter. Plus, having previously laid off 15 percent of staff, the newly-formed subsidiary site plans to slightly increase personnel up to 3,000 staffers.

Other benefits will come as Redbaby and Suning integrate more closely, saving on expenses such as warehousing and logistics. The wide range of babycare products will also boost Suning’s e-commerce site as the brick-and-mortar chain battles with more established online malls such as Tmall, 360Buy, and Amazon China.

Perhaps this will inspire other major e-commerce players to snap up some smaller indie rivals in 2013.

(Source: Xinhua – article in Chinese)

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Snapdeal brings the LYTRO Camera to India, Priced at INR 39,999

Lytro, the light field camera is now available in India on Snapdeal. Lytro is the first consumer camera that records the entire light field — all the rays of light travelling in every direction through a scene — instead of a flat 2D image. By capturing the light field, one can do incredible things like endlessly refocus pictures after taking them.

Lytro Camera in India

The price of Lytro camera in India starts from INR 39,999 (8 GB) and 16GB is priced at INR 47999.

The Lytro camera also enables users to refocus the photographs as many times as they wish and one can also interactively change their point of view in a picture after having captured the shot.

Related posts:

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2. The Multimedia Superphone, HTC Sensation Launched in India – Priced At Rs. 32.7K
3. Nokia launches Lumia 900 in India, Priced at Rs 32,999

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Couple app Between launches sticker store with version 1.4.0 update

Korea’s Between launches their sticker store featuring both local and foreign popular cartoon artists.

VCNC, the company behind fast rising couple app Between, has just released their version 1.4.0 update which includes a sticker store. The newly added sticker store currently offers eight sets of stickers for users to purchase, including the first two sets provided during the launch of the sticker feature back in November last year.

Talking to co-founder Edward Lee, he said that the couple app now has over 2.3 million downloads, growing over 300,000 additional downloads since they crossed the two million downloads mark a month ago.

The sticker store will use Apple’s App Store and Google Play’s payment gateway for sticker purchases. Currently all eight available sticker sets are priced at US$1.99, or S$2.58 for Singapore users. The stickers are from both Korean and foreign artists and includes popular cartoon artist HJ Story. The sticker store is VCNC’s second step to monetize from their app. They initially tried out an “Event Box” feature early on but have since focused on the stickers.

From the sticker store, users can see a “Brand” tab which currently has no offerings yet. According to Edward, the team is looking to engage brands who are would like to reach out to their strong base of users. The niche couple space would provide these brands with easier targeting. Observing what chat apps like LINE and KakaoTalk are doing in the region, Edward also mentioned that they are watching the games space to see if there’s an opportunity for them to bring more value to couples. Whatever their future plans, Edward and the VCNC team will continue to stick to the company’s goal of “enhancing offline relationships by providing an emotional mobile service”.

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Spawt withdraws from fund raising efforts, claims to have offers higher than Burpple’s “seed round”

Rather than be distracted by milestones and performance indicators that investors seek, Singapore based Spawt has decided to remain extremely focused to its vision of building a hyper-local discovery engine.

While sometimes we hear about startups not getting funding, how often have you heard about startups rejecting funding? Spawt, a place discovery app based in Singapore, has recently shared with e27 that the company is withdrawing from its fund-raising efforts after its first tier with the MDA iJam programme, despite several offers from investors.

So what’s the story? 

Co-founder and CEO Steven Goh shared that while the team did set up meetings with several investors, most of them really liked the technical make up of the founding team. However, they do not want to fall into the trap of taking money for the sake of taking money. When asked further on the actual offer and and who were the investors, Steven declined to reveal the offers.

“I don’t think it is right that we go into detail here but to give a ballpark, let’s just say that it was an amount higher than Burpple’s seed round. It was generally a positive effort. And we had the most earnest of investors, people who really cared more about entrepreneurs who gave the most sound advices. Which we gladly took, that is to not take money now till we refine our core deep tech.”

Read also: Neoteny and QuestVC feeds Burpple US$500K in funding

Spawt gains another programmer in its founding team

According to the press release that Steven sent us, the team has welcomed a new programmer into the team. Kian Wei joins the Spawt team in the quest to crack the problem of hyper-local discovery, taking a paycut all while embracing sheer uncertainty. Kian Wei was previously a senior engineer at ST Electronics.

With a strong technical founding team, Spawt is backed with programmers with at least a decade worth of programming among the team members. Rather than be distracted by milestones and performance indicators that investors seek, Spawt has decided to remain extremely focused to its vision of building a hyper-local discovery engine.

Spawt’s vision lies in helping you discover the best places to go, with the belief that the best recommendations are those made by your friends. Will that work? Are SoLoMo apps no longer appealing due to the sheer amount of new similar applications launched everyday? Let’s hope it does, now that the funding is off the table.

Read also: Asia’s top venture capitalists predict what’s in store for 2013

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AppSurfer brings (Android) tablet apps to the web [Try before you buy]

Mumbai based AppSurfer, which wants to be the Youtube of Android Apps has enabled developers to demo their tablet specific apps on AppSurfer, and users can now try (and buy) apps made specifically for tablets.

Appsurfer for Tablets

Given Android’s fragmentation and how broken App discovery is, AppSurfer‘s unique piece of technology provides a ‘try before you buy’ model to app consumers (better implementation than Google’s 15 minutes refund policy?).

The platform enables app owners to upload their apps (i.e. the .APK file) on Appsurfer site, immediately own an ‘app webpage’ that showcases their app on a virtual phone and then allow developers to share that page amongst friends, colleagues and clients. With just a few minutes of effort, developers can create a virtual, Internet presence of their app that otherwise remains buried in mobile app stores. Developers/Publishers can also embed the app on their blogs/pages, making it easy for consumers to actually see how the app works.

The moment users is done with the trial and decides to buy an app, they can navigate to Play store. In terms of features, AppSurfer currently supports GPS, Rotation of android phone, Audio output and single tap or double tap, drag. The platform doesn’t support Accelerometer support, Multitouch support or Apps dependent on ARM native libraries.

The company has received an early, Rs. 1 crore investment commitment from One97 Mobility Fund and has added Games2Win founder, Alok Kejriwal to its board (they launched DroidCloud at UnPluggd and later rebranded to AppSurfer which was showcased at Appnomy conference).

Related posts:

1. Appsurfer wants to be the Youtube of Android Apps
2. Android apps on Blackberry Playbook – Will Developers Embrace This Move?
3. Indian Android Developers can now sell Apps in the Play store? [Silently rolled out]

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3 E-commerce Trends to Watch in China in 2013

China’s e-commerce sector has grown rapidly over the course of the past five years. By the end of the third quarter of 2012, the total transaction volume of China’s online retail market reached $125 billion (781 billion Chinese yuan), which accounted for 5.2 percent of China’s total retail sales for consumer goods. Moving forward into the new year, what can we expect from China’s e-commerce sector in 2013?

1. China could overtake the US to become the world’s largest online shopping market

China’s 12th five-year economic development plan listed e-commerce as one of the priority sectors to develop. Its Ministry of Commerce announced that China is going to become the world’s largest online retail market by 2013. Regardless of whether this occurs in 2013 or 2014, given the vast netizen base in China and its constantly improving e-commerce ecosystem, China will become the largest e-commerce market sooner or later. According to a recent study that was conducted by my company ¹, in 2013, China’s online retail transactions are predicted to reach $251 billion – extremely close to $252 billion in the US. In terms of the number of online consumers, China has already surpassed all other nations, by possessing 228 million online shoppers – equivalent to approximately 73 percent of the entire US population. Whether or not China tops the world in 2013, the point is e-commerce has already significantly transformed the traditional retail landscape in China, and online shopping has become a central characteristic of Chinese consumers’ shopping habits.

2: Lower-tier cities will be more important in China’s online shopping landscape

photo: techzb.com

According to data released from Alibaba Group, the e-commerce conglomerate had an annual turnover of $160 billion (1 trillion Chinese yuan) in 2012. Sales in China’s lower-tier cities increased over 60 percent while the growth rate in first-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou was less than 40 percent year on year.

China’s inland provinces possess the greatest number of potential online shoppers. These shoppers are migrating online for the first time, learning from their counterparts in China’s major metropolises.

More importantly, with the improving logistics capacity in remote areas and improvements in online shopping safety, online channels will become increasingly popular among Chinese consumers from rural areas. The internet enables lower-tier consumers to access more products and brands, which may not be available in their local stores. This is especially good news for Western brands that want to try to reach more Chinese consumers given that building brick-and-mortar outlets in China’s central and Western provinces is risky. E-commerce therefore is a more flexible and cost-efficient approach to reaching the majority of Chinese consumers.

3. Mobile commerce in China is set to thrive in 2013

While many declared 2012 as the beginning of the mobile commerce era in China, m-commerce is set to explode in 2013. In the first half of 2012, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), 37.5 million online shoppers in China purchased products via their smartphones, which increased 59.7 percent year on year. Turnover of mobile purchases accounted for roughly five percent of the total transaction volume of all online shopping, and this share is expected to reach 15 percent by 2015.

Mobile phones have replaced desktop computers to become the main devices for accessing internet in 2012 ². Due to the overall increase in usage of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets, mobile commerce will keep on gaining popularity and grow in significance. In addition, barriers that hold back the development of mobile commerce in China are diminishing, and improved 3G network capabilities will considerably advance user experience for shopping via mobile devices. Moreover, mobile payment in China is evolving rapidly as well. Market research company iResearch, predicts in the following three to five years that China’s mobile payment market will increase at a rate of over 40 percent year-on-year.

China’s e-commerce sector will only grow in strategic importance for Western and Asian firms alike. As we begin 2013, these three trends will undoubtedly be key drivers for its growth over the course of the year. Companies and entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize on the potential of China’s e-commerce sector should keep these trends in mind as they execute on their business plans for 2013.

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1. Disclosure: I’m a contributing analyst for the Multimedia Research Group, the company behind this study.

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2. 388 million Chinese netizens access the internet via their mobile phones while the number of Chinese who access the internet via desktop computers was 380 million.

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Blackberry 10 Will Come with 100,000 Apps

RIM’s new Blackberry 10 seems to be riding in on a high note ahead of its launch next week as it clocked over 34,000 new apps ported onto BB10 during the Blackberry Port-A-Thon event. This means that the highly anticipated new OS will arrive with around 104,000 apps ready for action, making the smartphone quite smart indeed.

Does the number matter much though? Yes I think it does. While Android and iOS have far bigger numbers (passing the 700,000 mark), and Windows Phone has just reached 150,000 apps, the new Blackberry 10 isn’t that far behind the number three spot in terms of sheer volume of apps.

Furthermore, should the upcoming Blackberry 10 sales prove to be successful, particularly here in Indonesia which is RIM’s last stronghold of young users, then a lot more developers would see reason to port/develop apps for Blackberry 10.

Ahead of the launch, Blackberry is also revamping its Blackberry App World, starting from the webstore being renamed Blackberry World. The app will be updated later too. The store will soon be stocked with not only apps, but also music, TV shows, and movies just like Apple iTunes or Google Play. But it’s not clear if Indonesia will get all that new multi-media content to purchase, and so far Blackberry World says that the content will be limited in some regions. We’ve reached out to RIM for clarification on this.

The upcoming Blackberry 10 will be launched globally on January 30th, just eight days from now. The arrival date for Indonesia is still a bit vague as it will be delayed somewhat. Will Blackberry 10 be able to garner favorable reception from the public next week? And can it fend off the march of Android? Let’s wait and see.

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On-demand private chauffeur service Uber launches in Singapore, base fare starts at S$7.00

Uber, a private car hire service started in the US, has just announced their launch in Singapore, marking its first entry to the Asian market.

Uber is your on demand private driver. While news about their expansion into Singapore was first spotted by SGEntrepreneurs back in October, the company has officially announced that they have launched in Singapore.

In its latest Series B funding back in 2011, Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos And Goldman Sachs invested a total of US$32M into the then 18 months old company. Some of its other investors include CrunchFund, Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital as well as a few other individual investors. The company is founded by Travis Kalanick, Oscar Salazar, as well as Garrett Camp, also the founder of popular discovery site StumbleUpon.

With its launch in Singapore, Singaporeans who have hard times getting a cab during peak hours or when it rains can now have an alternative to choose from. However, Uber is charging Singaporean users a base fare of S$7.00, and a minimum fare of S$12.00. The price is very steep if compared to the taxis in Singapore, where the typical flag down rate is S$3.20. Here’s the side by side fare comparison between Uber and Singapore’s taxi:

While the service can definitely help to ease some of the constant complaint towards the unavailability of Singapore taxis especially during the rain and during peak hours, the price point of Uber is more than double the price point of other taxi operators in Singapore. Other than that, a private operator like Uber would leave issues such as safety as well as driver’s accountability unchecked.

Read also: GoMyWay launches to allow Singaporeans to share taxi rides. Is sharing natural for local taxi riders?

In a tightly regulated country like Singapore, it will be interesting to see how will the Land Transport Authority respond to this.

Uber is now fully launched or testing in 29 cities worldwide. That includes locations in the US, Canada, UK, Paris, Germany, Australia and now Singapore.

 

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An emergency situation, a missed call and Savdhan will alert your family and social network

The recent Delhi rape case has been an eye opener for many. Apart from the fact that we need better governance, the truth is that we also need a better technology system in place to handle such incidents.

Bangalore based Savdhan is a great attempt to build a guardian network which you’d need during an emergency situation. The way it works is very simple – signup, connect your Facebook/Twitter handle, add connections and when in emergency situation, simply give a missed call to the assigned number.

Savdhan

Savdhan gives you two options of numbers : 1) I am Ok and 2) I am not OK.

Once Savdhan receives your missed call, it will update all your network (the ones who you have connected your account with)- right from Facebook, Twitter to phone numbers and email ids you have added with the appropriate message.

Savdhan: I am Okay

Is there an app for that? The team is working on that, but a simple missed call facility is what is needed to alert the guardian and friend network. App, I believe is an overhead unless it’s part of your home screen.

The service is currently free to use and the team might revisit that depending on SMS cost etc.

Do give Savdhan a dekho and share your feedback with the team.

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2. New Poll – Is it ‘Cool’ to own a Nokia Phone these days? Answer by giving us a missed call
3. Koovs Partners with ZipDial to Improve CoD Experience [Give a missed call to confirm the order]

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Tencent Weibo, the ‘Other Weibo’ That Nobody Cares About, Reaches 540 Million Users

Much of the social media buzz in China – and a lot of our own coverage – is about Sina Weibo. But it’s worth remembering that one other Twitter-esque site in the country is technically larger: Tencent Weibo. Yesterday, Marbridge Daily spotted that Tencent’s (HKG:0700) manager of its Weibo division, Xing Hongyu, said that his service reached 540 million registered users at the end of 2012. That exceeds the 400 million on Sina Weibo in the third quarter of last year.

While that’s all very nice for Tencent Weibo, it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not as cool as Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) offering. And, more importantly, Sina Weibo has more active users:

Thanks to We Are Social for the graphics. Yes, at 2012 Q3, Tencent Weibo had 10 million fewer active users a few months back. Xing Hongyu also revealed yesterday that Tencent Weibo has 100 million daily active users.

But the main reason for all the buzz going to Sina Weibo is the nature of its user-base. That’s because Sina’s users are mostly living in China’s wealthiest cities (tier one and two areas, from Beijing to Wuhan, Shanghai to Hangzhou), while Tencent Weibo’s users are in poorer cities or rural areas, and are not worth as much for social media marketing and are not the kind of folks who can set the national agenda when discussing issues online. Here’s the comparison:

Of course, Tencent Weibo does do some cool things; its coordinated approach to the London Olympics coverage was fun and popular, and you can even buy cars directly within the social service. But its Sina rival remains the “Weibo” that people are actually talking about.

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