VanityTrove begins SE Asian consolidation with Glossybox Taiwan acquisition

Beauty sampling platform VanityTrove has announced that it has commenced its consolidation in the Southeast Asia market with its acquisition of Rocket Internet’s Glossybox Taiwan.

VanityTrove has much to celebrate this 2013. At the start of the year, the beauty discovery platform reached 10 million followers on Facebook. In the past 12 months, the startup has strengthened its position in South East Asia as a platform for beauty brands to reach an online audience wanting to sample their products.

To facilitate its expansion into the region, VanityTrove has acquired Glossybox Taiwan, and has appointed Sanjay Shivkumar as its new CEO.

Derek Lee, Glossybox CEO, said that combining Glossybox Taiwan with VanityTrove is a logical step for its subscribers. “We are bullish with the overall sampling business and believe we can continue to add value to global beauty brands by focusing our efforts in serving the larger markets,” he said.

VanityTrove CEO Sanjay Shivkumar says the company aims to be the “obvious partner for beauty brands to sample, market and sell their products.” In line with this, the startup is working to ensure that VanityTrove remains number one in the markets it operates in. “Our focus in South East Asia will enable us to serve a growing untapped market largely neglected by the west,” said Sanjay.

This acquisitions consolidates the two companies’ markets, including a total geographic reach of five countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan, with a potential reach of 100 million women in their target market segments. There is more to come, and there is potential in at least two more markets, although Douglas says the team does not want to spread themselves too thin. “We would like to focus in consolidation across the 5 key markets of South East Asia before venturing further.”

The beauty-related industries are active as of late, with Taiwan’s Fashionguide receiving funding from Cyberagent Ventures last month  and bellabox receiving Series A funding in the same month. VanityTrove notes that beauty boxes around the world are consolidating, with Birchbox in the U.S. crossing over to Europe with an acquisition by Joliebox. And with Rocket Internet pulling out Glossybox of Southeast Asia to focus in its other markets, this leaves VanityTrove as its sole Southeast Asian counterpart, with the added benefit of a presence in other markets in the region.

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Beauty box startup VanityTrove acquires Glossybox Taiwan, a Rocket Internet company

Following an announcement of its expansion into Taiwan, Singapore’s VanityTrove has today revealed that it has acquired Glossybox Taiwan for an undisclosed sum. For Glossybox, a Rocket Internet company, this move completes its exit from several countries in the region in order to focus its efforts on larger markets in Europe and North Asia.

Both Glossybox and VanityTrove are subscription commerce companies modeled after Birchbox.  Every month, they deliver ‘beauty boxes’ containing cosmetic samples to subscribers, while at the same time acting as a marketing platform for cosmetic brands.

VanityTrove Taiwan will be led by its new CEO, Sanjay Shivkumar, who is also the co-founder of Replaid, a mobile development company most well-known for Summon Auntie, an app that helps users prevent getting booked for illegal parking.

Taiwan is the latest destination in VanityTrove’s aggressive expansion efforts. Started out of Singapore in December 2011, the company has expanded to Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. In August 2012, it had around 5,000 subscribers and over 15,000 deliveries, and is in the midst of raising a round of funding.

Its brands partnership team has grown too, increasing from a staff strength of 3 six months ago to 13 employees in January 2013 to accommodate demand from beauty brands.

This acquisition could potentially propel VanityTrove into becoming a market leader in Southeast Asia plus Taiwan. The company gets Glossybox Taiwan’s subscriber list, and will continue to fulfill orders for existing Glossybox customers.

“Combining with impeccably reputed VanityTrove was an obvious step for our subscribers. After welcoming our subscribers, VanityTrove will be the clear market leader in Southeast Asia,” said Derek Lee, CEO of Taiwan Glossybox. Discussions for the merger began before Glossybox announced that it was leaving the country.

Glossybox’s exit from Taiwan, and Hong Kong as well as Australia before that, would probably still make it the largest beauty box company in the world. It has 250,000 subscribers in North Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Birchbox, meanwhile, was known to have over 100,000 subscribers in Europe and the United States.

Moving forward, VanityTrove will focus on consolidating its presence in the five markets before venturing farther.

“While we acknowledge the potential in at least 2 more Southeast Asian markets, we are careful not to spread management bandwidth too thin,” said Douglas Gan, co-founder of VanityTrove.

2013 is shaping up to be a breakout year for subscription commerce companies from Asia.

Over the past two years, these startups have been quietly building their customer base and establishing themselves quickly into profitable businesses.

Then, just couple of weeks ago, Bellabox, another beauty box brand with a presence in Singapore and Australia, announced that it had raised a Series A round of USD1.4M.

If the subscription commerce concept continues to gain traction, they could become attractive acquisition targets for New York headquartered Birchbox, who had acquired European clones in a bid to expand there and might do the same in Asia.

For complete insights and analysis of beauty box companies in Asia, purchase our premium report “Unwrapping the Beauty Box industry in Asia-Pacific.” You will get an in-depth look at:

• the business model of beauty box companies and how it should be executed,
• facts and figures on the industry and individual competitors’ latest developments,
• the growth potential of beauty box companies in Asia,
• challenges they’re facing and how they can be mitigated.

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Facebook’s new obsession with ROI

Drawing from Fab.com’s case study, Dave Sloan, Senior Strategist at Septeni, highlights four key lessons for advertising on Facebook.

Facebook’s pitch to brands has always been to increase customer engagement. Create a page with a stylish cover photo, recruit a fan base, engage your audience, consistently post original, authentic content, etc, etc. Be more open. Be more connected.

But recently Facebook has been shifting its traditional marketing narrative to a conversation around sales. In the past six months we’ve seen Facebook evolve its suite of ad products to direct response ads units and sales conversion tools with a focus on customer acquisition strategies in high demand by e-commerce, travel, and media customers.

A recent case study by up-and-coming, New York based e-commerce company Fab.com is probably one of the most indicative examples of the influence Facebook can have on the bottom line. Here are four lessons that all ROI focused brands can learn from the Fab.com case study:

Targeting works

Facebook allows a level of targeting that Google can’t offer.  Ads can be targeted by demographic, gender, age, and interests.  “In terms of paid advertising on Facebook, what we try to do is hone in on product images that are going to elicit an emotional response from people.   We can literally take everything in our catalog, and narrowly target it to our customers.”

Mobile ad units drive acquisition

Fab.com was an early adopter of the “apps you may like” mobile ad unit on Facebook. “Mobile has a much higher conversation rate for us. We’ve been working with Facebook, most recently, on getting mobile downloads. We’re off to a good start, it’s been about 5 times more effective than other mobile channels that we’ve used.”

Conversion tracking and ad optimization works

Fab.com was also an early user of the new Facebook conversion tracking tool, which more accurately shows where sales conversions originated from. “Online retailer Fab.com was able to reduce its cost per new customer acquisition by 39% when it used conversion measurement and optimization to serve ads to consumers deemed most likely to convert.”

Custom Audience allows even better targeting

Facebook’s new custom audience tool offers “some of the best targeting available on or offline today,” according to Sheryl Sandberg. Fab.com targets their “purchasers on Facebook, and not surprisingly, they have a 10x propensity to come back and purchase from us than a generally targeted user.” That’s an amazing example of the value of cross-referencing a customer database with a Facebook fan database.

Facebook advertisers have long complained that Facebook ads under-perform. If fact the SocialFresh Facebook ad survey revealed that 45% of respondents identified ROI as their biggest Facebook ad challenge. But Facebook has responded. And quickly. As seen by the Fab.com case study, advertisers can prove on ROI on Facebook with the right ad units, hyper-targeting, and with ad optimization.

About the author

Dave is senior strategist at Septeni APAC and is based in Singapore. Septeni is a Japanese digital agency that has optimized over 300 Facebook ad campaigns since July 2010. You can reach Dave at dave@septeni.com or on Twitter at @dave_sloan.

Image Credits: smallbiz technology

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Crowdfunding in Taiwan – An idea whose time has come?

Professional educator, Jonathan Woods, takes a closer look at the crowdfunding scene in Taiwan.

FlyingV is a crowdfunding platform in Taiwan that enables creative people to raise money to fund projects from individuals online. Inspired by Kickstarter and Indiegogo in the United States, the founders saw crowdfunding as an idea that could flourish in Taiwan, and launched the platform in April of 2012.

I caught up with founders Light Lin and Tim Cheng to discuss FlyingV and what to expect from crowdfunding in Taiwan.

Mandate to Help Taiwanese Entrepreneurs

The founders emphasize their ‘dual mandate’ in Taiwan of creating a viable crowdfunding business while helping to educate talented individuals about testing the viability of ideas, gaining validation, and hustling to develop awareness of their projects.

Crowdfunding and Taiwan

Earlier generations brought affluence to Taiwan through manufacturing, strict cost controls, and a relentless search for higher efficiency. The last ten years have seen a shift in the ethos away from the OEM manufacturing model to one focusing on services meeting domestic demand. The entrepreneurial spirit remains fierce among the population of the island, and it is looking for new channels through which to manifest.

Because of this, Lin and Cheng are convinced crowdfunding is an idea whose time has come in Taiwan. “Crowdfunding in Taiwan is one of the best fits. There’s a good foundation for it to work in Taiwan, better even than Korea or Japan,” said Cheng.

The reason for this, they say, is the country’s rich history and acceptance of foreign ideas, an economy built on small businesses, factories, and workshops instead of revolving around a few mega-corporations, and evolving economic identity.

Low Salary Drives Young Entrepreneurs

The founders cited the recent ‘22K’ buzzword as reinforcing their view. Well-known among the Taiwanese, 22K refers to the NT$22 000 (US$744) monthly salary a graduate can expect to make after finishing university, a figure lower than it was 14 years ago.

The founders see a silver lining here:  for a country that breathes entrepreneurship, there is no longer much of an opportunity cost to forgoing employment for a startup, a notion that is gradually diffusing throughout the society.  When considering entry-level employment, “young people are losing their hope. We want to try to restore people’s hope by introducing a choose-yourself option for graduates.”

Goal to Develop an Ecosystem

Lin and Cheng want to play a central role in this transformation. Lin noted that  “Pre-2010, the ecosystem was bad in Taiwan. Very little investment, and start-ups were virtually non-existent”.

Lin said he wanted to develop that ecosystem and contribute to channeling Taiwan’s natural entrepreneurial spirit into startups, but that he “had no desire to start an incubator”.  Instead, the idea was to create a business that itself helped to develop the Taiwan ecosystem, and they have backed up that sentiment as they have made an effort to have face-to-face meetings with everyone who has put a project up.  “To us, the idea of success is not based on the success of the site, but upon the extent to which the ecosystem develops”.

Government’s Role

The government has taken note and has started commissioning studies along with GreTai Securities Market, an over-the-counter securities market in Taiwan, into crowdfunding and other options for easier access to capital for startups. They are looking to the example set in the United States with the JOBS Act and CROWDFUND Act.  Lin and Cheng hope that endorsement and promotion by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Culture, and Institute for Information Industry can act as stamps of approval that encourage entrepreneurs.

Future of Crowdfunding in Taiwan

The initial response to crowdfunding has been positive.  They have witnessed 35 projects get funded for a total of NT$10 million (US$338,650), mostly in film and music relating to Taiwan’s culture and history, though with some success in hardware.

Both founders acknowledge that Taiwan is a small market and are aiming “not for quick, but for steady” growth,

They also expect the arrival of other crowdfunding platforms to join them and others in the country, such as Zeczec.com, which focuses on local artists. While crowdfunding is nascent in Taiwan, they are “sure this year there’s going to be a number of new crowdfunding platforms in Taiwan,” and a greater awareness of this option for funding. While they have not yet seen their version of the Pebble Watch, both are confident that it is only a matter of time.

About the author

Jonathan Woods is a professional educator with years of experience in learning and development consulting to top-tier companies. He is currently the program manager for Core & Corner and is the co-founder of EnglishVids.

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Pi of Life : Strain, Stresses and Pressures inside the Startup Cauldron

Jason Calacanis sent a mail out after Jody Sherman’s death suicide. He raised issues about the stresses an entrepreneur goes through, and about what success meant, and should be celebrated. He also mentioned other similar tragedies of the recent past – that of Aaron Swartz, and of Diaspora’s co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy.

All of these guys were relatively young, and stars in their own right. All of them probably faced different stresses, and had their own ‘reasons’ – not that anything justifies this kind of a step. But these are serious, avoidable losses in more ways than one.

Why did they happen? We don’t know. We won’t even try guessing – the mind is too complex a thing for us to fathom, and we’re not equipped or qualified either. But we do see problems at the level of the individual once in a while as we interact with so many folks.

Entrepreneurship is a tough, often lonely journey. Its a roller coaster, like everyone says. Thing is, there’s a lot of excitement on the ups – people around you, conversations, kudos, encouragement – and time just flies past. The downslopes, on the other hand, seem to last forever. The light’s gone out, and there’s just walls to talk to. Worse, outwardly you often have to maintain a facade of cheerfulness and positivity. All this still does not mean you should allow yourself to ever descend into a vicious loop of depression, dejection and loss of hope. That’s just plain absurd.

Remember you’re not alone.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, out there exactly like you who’re facing the worst challenge of their lives, seem to have lost the drive or energy, have broken relationships, finances in tatters and visions and dreams crushed by reality. You just have to believe it’ll get better – because it always does! Those homilies about it all being a learning experience are way more than that – they’re the mantra to not just go through the pain, but enjoy the journey which its a part of.

Reach Out.

To a community of people you can share your journey with. Build a network of those you trust, and communicate with them regularly. It might seem like an overhead when you have a gazillion things to do, and a support group may not fit the macho “I-can-handle-it-entrepreneur” picture you’ve painted in your head, but please recognize you’re human. This is also a great reason to work with a co-founder. Many of us need support during our lows, and having another person helps through those phases.

Watch Out.

Look out for other folks around you. Ask people how they are, or if you can help. Be there especially when things aren’t going that great. Pick up the phone, catch someone on chat, meet for coffee. It takes only a few minutes, but letting someone know they’re not alone in their battle helps.

Celebrate Failure.

This, all of us need to do better, and more of. It acquires a completely new dimension in the context of this article. When people do things wrong, or things go wrong for them, its important to remember to critique the issue, not the person. Its important to lend a hand in whatever small way and to applaud the effort itself. In fact, its important to find and point out the silver lining, and highlight the path ahead.

Because hope is an entrepreneurs most valuable currency. And spreading it is what makes the journey enjoyable.

Team NextBigWhat and the awesome community on the Forum are forever willing to listen, lend a shoulder, hand and walk alongside. Do give us a shout to share not just your successes, but your pain, pressure, failure – everything.

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2. 7 Things I learnt from Barfi! [The biggest risk in life is NOT taking any risks]
3. “Our first board meeting took place inside our hostel room.” – TechBuddy Consulting: From Student Startup to Nurturing College Students

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Chinese WoW Player Sleeps With Guild Members “For the Alliance”

World of Warcraft players have gone viral in some pretty weird ways in the past, but a Chinese gamer may have created a new piece of Chinese internet history recently when he told guild members that he had had one night stands with several of the guild’s female members “for the Alliance.” His chat with another WoW player about his exploits has since been posted to a number of gaming sites (including QQ Games) and has attracted hundreds of comments. After an extended discussion, the other player asks “So you switched servers and came into our guild just to do our girls?” and the first gamer responds simply: “For the Alliance.”

Some netizens are clearly amused. “For the Alliance, I’ve got to upvote that,” wrote one commenter in Anhui province. “Fighting for the Alliance both online and off; all Alliance players should support this.” “Wow, what a badass response,” wrote another commenter in Zhengzhou.

It’s not all a joke though, as the chat and comments threads have both raised a lot of questions about the way women are viewed and treated online. The player who slept with the girls, for example, argued that everyone involved was an adult, and there was no reason to publicize or make a big deal out of his sex life or the sex lives of these female players. But the guild member he was chatting with berated him for refusing to “take responsibility” for his actions.

Some of the comments on the story are also blatantly sexist. One Guangxi commenter wrote, “I’d dare to say that any girl who plays games all day is a mess and smokes cigarettes. If you treat girls in the game as prostitutes it’s fine, but don’t take them at face value; they act very innocent in the chat but their professional skills under the sheets are world-class.”

Luckily, it seems that the identity of the girls the WoW player slept with — if his story is actually true — haven’t been revealed by him or by the angry guild member he was chatting with. In the midst of this strange story, that certainly seems to be the bright spot, especially since there’s no real evidence the story is even true. But the online controversy over it has brought the issue of sexism in China’s gaming community boiling to the surface once again, and the picture isn’t pretty.

Sexism in the Chinese gaming community is an issue we will be looking into in more depth over the next few weeks. If you have a relevant story to share, or if you’re a female Chinese gamer and would like to offer your opinion, please leave a comment or get in touch with us!

(via QQ Games, image source)

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Qiuqiu: Help You Find the Other Half on Mobile

China’s location-based stranger networking app Momo earned itself mixed reception among mobile users, some adore it for its “hooking-up” utility while the others hate it for the same reason. The company’s latest product launch of version 3.0 took efforts to play down that part, trying to reimagine itself as a decent mobile social networking app.

And that’s the direction a Beijing-based startup has been working on for the past several months, after they graduated from Dalian-based incubating program ChinaAccelerator in the middle of this year with Qiuqiu, a mobile dating app.

Judging by the name, it’s perceivable that the app has something to do with love as Qiuqiu the name sounds a bit like Cupid the god of love.

Michael Lewis, co-founder of the team behind Qiuqiu, told me that the app differs from other similar services in its ideas of “Taste Test” and “Match Maker”.

With “Taste Test” feature, you’ll be presented with four pictures of girls (or guys, depends on your gender), choose the one that attracts you the most, then the pictures go away when four text boxes with profile description appears, again, choose the one that most suits you. Then you’ll get to see if you connect the face and the profile, if you does, congs and if – often times – you fails, then you need to choose between the face and the profile, make the decision and then Qiuqiu will do some calculation to examine the match index between you two. If the match index hit above 50%, then you can message the potential other half via the app, otherwise, you’ll have to try your luck by taking another taste test.

Qiuqiu’s Pentagram in deciding the match index for users

 

Who makes the final call in calculating the match index? Qiuqiu employs a pentagram consisted of five attributes including looks, background, zoadic, location and network to decide if you two are really a match.

As for “Match Maker”, you can introduce your friends to each other by setting them up via the app.

Michael believes that there’ll be more opportunities for services like Qiuqiu to break out as the numbers of Chinese singles are keep increasing. Those people who grow up with mobile devices internet are more like to use apps and Internet to find their love instead of walking into a traditional dating agency, or go towards so-called dating sites which are just an online version of those offline agencies.

Qiuqiu currently was still in beta testing. You can try it out here.

 

Related posts:

1. Qiuqiu, a Location and Interests Based Discovery Engine For Android Applications
2. Mobile Social App Momo Surpasses Half a Million Users, Coming to Android
3. 51CTO Phone-Club：5th Mobile Development Technology Salon

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Dodo China Presents a New Way to Learn Chinese More Easily

There’s a quite interesting discussion on Quora about how hard it is to learn Mandarin, the irrelevance between the speaking and writing system, the hidden meaning behind four- and eight-character idioms called chenyu or suyu and then the dialects are all giving a hard time to non-native speakers of Chinese who thought naively they can conquer the language in the first place but only to find – to quote directly from the thread – “Mandarin is just too damn hard”.

A new app dubbed Dodo China which was just made available in Apple App Store, is poised to crack the code by integrating the culture connotation of every Chinese characters into the learning process. This mindset lies in the intrinsic nature of Chinese pictographic characters. Since almost every character resembles the drawing that mirrors the real world – for instance, the word bird (鸟) “looks like a standing bird in profile, with a raised head, a drooping tail, and claws at the bottom” – the app leverages on the pictorial nature of the hieroglyphic writing system and guide foreigner to learn Chinese in a more pictorial and hence more intuitive way, via plenty of illustrations.

 

Basically, the app baked visualized connotation, or simply put, illustrations associated with a Chinese character, into the learning scene. By using it, not only you’ll see the meanings of a word through an approach commonly adopted by other Chinese learning services, but also you’ll get to see pictures convey the meanings has to do with the words you’re looking at, be it the ancient Chinese fair/drama or other culture settings.

That’s the ultimate goal of the app, instead of just reciting words and meanings, now you can walk into and better understand the past and now of Chinese. And that, is so much an easier, more interesting and more beautiful way to conquer a “damn hard” language. MoreChinese, the company behind Dodo China claimed that with this initiative, they want to help foreigners cross the obstacles of language to discover and understand a real China.

Visit their website for more information or download Dodo China here.

 

 

 

Image Credit: Dodo China/MoreChinese

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2. A Lesson From BBC.com Chinese Media Sites Should Learn
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Stolen Personal Information is Still For Sale on the Chinese Internet

On Friday, China’s government announced new standards for the protection of personal information online. But an investigation by the Guangzhou Daily discovered that on the eve of the new standards’ release, stolen personal information was still easy and cheap to purchase online.

Moreover, the depth of the information available from some “investigation companies” was quite shocking, and points to serious security flaws in China’s telecom networks and in Tencent’s QQ chat software. On service advertised that for any car owner, it could provide a residential address, name, phone number, state ID number, and the car’s engine number for just 130 RMB ($20). Another company advertised that in addition to the usual personal details, it could even provide text message content records, phone records, and QQ chat records, as well as other bits of information as requested by clients.

The spread of smartphones (and smartphone trojans, which security firm Qihoo 360 says are now more prevalent than ever) has played a large role in the stolen personal information industry, as many people have huge amounts of personal information (including text, phone, and chat logs) all stored on their mobiles, which are then exposed fairly constantly to new networks and other security hazards.

So, if the New York Times hacking story from earlier this week wasn’t enough to convince you, here’s another reminder: keep your information secure, especially on your phone! If you don’t, anybody with $20 and a grudge could be able to buy their way into ruining your life.

(Guangzhou Daily via Sina Tech, Image source)

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KakaoTalk Launches Social Gaming Platform on iOS and in Japan

Korean-made messaging app KakaoTalk launched its Game Platform on Android in its home country last July – and today that social gaming system is rolling out on iOS and coming to Japan as well. It’s a major challenge to chief rival Line app, made by NHN Japan, as well as to other social gaming platforms from that country, such as GREE and DeNA’s Mobage.

For KakaoTalk users, it means that they now have six iOS apps by third-party developers that are tied to KakaoTalk’s social gaming network. As pointed out by Serkan Toto today, those titles are: Tap Tap Blitz, Puzzle Zoo Zoo, Sushi Panic (pictured above), Zoo Zoo Bubble, and Pocket Colony.

Mobile gamers in Japan will also have access to the KakaoTalk Game Platform in a bunch of supported Android games. Those include SundayToz’ Anipang, which was the first success story on the KakaoTalk platform as the messaging app’s users proved to be keen gamers who downloaded Anipang over two million times in a couple of weeks. That soon made it the second highest grossing game on Google Play in South Korea.

KakaoTalk is hoping to have 100 games on board by the end of the year.

Global ambitions

This push into Japan is supported by Yahoo Japan, which owns 50 percent of Kakao Japan, the messaging app’s subsidiary in that country.

In the huge battle for mobile messaging users, KakaoTalk has over 70 million users, up against Line’s crowd of 100 million. Line also incorporates social gaming, and has likewise spurred on some games to great popular success. It’s not quite so balanced in Japan, however. Serkan cites The Nikkei as saying that KakaoTalk has seven million users in Japan, while NHN’s Line has 41 million of its total user-base within Japan.

Interestingly, the Kakao company was founded by Beom-Soo Kim, the former CEO of Korea-based NHN Corporation, which later went on to spawn Line app from the NHN Japan subsidiary.

Both Line and KakaoTalk have global ambitions, with the two rivals looking to young and mobile-oriented Southeast Asian users at first. Countries like Taiwan and Indonesia have proved to be particularly strong battle grounds for the apps – though neither provide social gaming in those nations.

(Source: Serkan Toto)

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Baidu-Owned Qunar Chases the Money with New Luxury Hotel Portal

Baidu-owned (NASDAQ:BIDU) travel e-commerce site Qunar today opened up a luxury hotel section on its site. Packed with over 2,000 high-end hotels in some of China’s top cities and holiday destinations, it represents an inevitable play for China’s blossoming luxury e-tailing sector.

The new Qunar luxury portal is on the lh.qunar.com subdomain, and bears a more minimalist and sophisticated look than its regular frontpage.

It contains nothing that Qunar didn’t already offer on its site for years, but now its top hotels have been compartmentalized and presented on a much nicer page. So it’s a pretty minor roll-out, but a smart move to make, allowing Qunar to better showcase its hotel chain partners, such as Hyatt and Shangri-La, and the numerous boutique and designer hotels that are available. For now the new luxury hotel portal is focusing on just 10 cities.

Qunar revealed to Chinese media today that 21 percent of the site’s bookings are for hotel rooms that cost over 500 RMB (US$80) per night, so it made sense to spin-off these offerings. In addition, Qunar claimed that, compared to its major rival Ctrip, which is China’s top online travel agent, the Baidu-run site is able to offer a 10 percent lower price than Ctrip on 64 percent of its five-star properties.

Qunar faces stiff and diverse competition in both the top-end and normal travel segments in China. At the higher price points there are very specialist, tailored travel packages being sold by startups like Zanadu and TripTM, the latter of which was acquired by Ctrip last year. At the lower-end of the scale there are mobile-oriented travel e-commerce apps popping up, such as Bingdian and Hotel Finder.

Baidu took a majority stake in Qunar in the summer of 2011 thanks to a $306 million investment. It’s rumored that the subsidiary could be one of many Chinese web companies shooting for a US IPO later this year.

(Source: iMeigu – article in Chinese)

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Dexetra raises over $1 million form Sequoia and Qualcomm

Sequoia Capital and Qualcomm ventures have invested over $1 million in Dexetra, the company which made contextual personal search app Friday for Android. The company confirmed the funding to TechCrunch. NextBigWhat had reported on the deal last November.

The Bangalore based startup recently announced integration of its 2 successful product – Iris and Friday. Iris is like the Siri for Android. The company which recently moved to the US, claims 120,000 users for its app. It raised funding from One97 Mobility fund earlier.

Iris has server over 250 million answers through the platform and Friday boasts of over 100 million documents to the Friday cloud. The Friday app keeps a record of the locations you have visited, the music you listen to, new contacts you add, calendar entries and various other things you do on your phone and makes it easier for you search and retrieve these instances stored on your phone.

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