Greengar, Asia’s Only Contestant at Women 2.0, Releases Smartboard App

Today, the Women 2.0 Conference is happening in San Francisco. The event, which “features successful women entrepreneurs who reached milestones of billions” with web businesses, will be having a Pitch Startup Competition where startups with at least one female founding member can pitch onstage to judges for prizes ranging from $3,000 gift certificates to larger startup resources. This year, Vietnam’s got a contestant: Thuy from Greengar. This makes Greengar the only participant from Asia at Women 2.0.

Draw something, anything

Greengar is a startup formed by two University of Southern California graduates: Elliot Lee and Thuy Thanh Truong. In the early days, Elliot took the lead by teaching himself Objective C and releasing two apps in late 2008: Pitch Pipe and Brain Tuner. In August 2009, Greengar released Whiteboard, an app for collaborative drawing, which has gone on to over seven million downloads. To date, with 22 apps for iPhone, 15 apps for iPad, and nine apps for Android, the company’s got over 13 million downloads already before the release of Smartboard on February 11th.

Thuy has been CEO at Greengar since August last year. When she first came back to Vietnam after graduating from USC in 2009, she started a frozen yogurt chain, raising up to $400,000 and opening up five branches in Ho Chi Minh city. In 2011, she closed down the chain to go into Greengar full time and is now leading as the CEO, with Elliot having moved onto electric cars.

From Whiteboard to Smartboard

With Thuy at Women 2.0, her team has scrambled to get Smartboard released just in time for the event. Greengar’s handful of apps have focused on utilities like Flashlightr and Color Identifier, plus games like the recently released Typing With Strangers.

Smartboard actually falls in line with an idea that Greengar has been working on for awhile: drawing. Every year since 2009, Greengar has released apps that encourage users to draw. In 2009, Whiteboard Lite and Whiteboard Pro were released. In 2010 and 2011, Whiteboard HD and Whiteboard were released. And finally, Draw Together in 2012, similar to famed Draw Something, which is an online picture puzzle/drawing game. The concept behind Whiteboard is allowing multiple devices to collaborate on drawings together in realtime.

Smartboard is a basic rebuild of the Whiteboard app, although I think they’re very similar. There aren’t any obvious feature differences between Whiteboard and Smartboard, and they appear very similar. The big feature changes include iCloud, Evernote, and Google Drive integration and the ability to connect 5 smartphones and tablets with each other. It’s a pretty cool app for collaboration, though I’d like to see a larger area to draw on.

Good luck to Thuy and Smartboard at the Women 2.0 pitching contest.

You can download Smartboard at the AppStore here or at the Google Play Store here.

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Visa launches plug-and-play mobile money platform

With new plug-and-play mobile money platform, Visa will offer bank-grade financial services to simplify transactions.

Visa Inc. announced yesterday with the launch of a new plug-and-play mobile money platform that will be more cost-efficient for financial institutions and mobile operators to offer financial services for their customers and simplify transactions.

Designed and tailored for use by financial institutions and mobile operators, this new platform is a one-stop solution for providing mobile money services built on high standards of security, reliability and interoperability.

Selling points include a mobile money program management, support for any mobile channel, support for a comprehensive set of transactions, customer support and regulatory compliance, and Visa-standard of payment security.

This platform is the first in the world to have bank-grade managed service for mobile money. This means that it allows Visa to host and manage all aspects of the program on behalf of the provider, such as user interface design, authorization and clearing.

Consumers in India and Rwanda who are currently unbanked will be the first to benefit from this service. Aircel mobile subscribers in India and customers of the Bank of Kigali and Urwego Opportunity Bank in Rwanda will now have access to an account linked to their mobile number.

These consumers can make use of the financial services and Visa-quality payments to pay bills, remit money, top up airtime and buy train tickets.

Aircel, India’s fifth largest and fastest growing GSM mobile service provider and pan India operator, will be partnering with local banks to offer money services to mobile subscribers.

“Aircel prides itself in offering its subscribers the most innovative mobile applications that meet the unique needs of consumers in India,” said Geoff King, Head of Mobile Banking, Aircel.

“We applaud the pioneers in Africa, Asia and the Middle East who have launched closed-loop mobile financial services and reached so many consumers so quickly,” said Bill Gajda, Head of Global Mobile Products for Visa Inc.

Gajda added, “Visa’s new mobile money platform is designed to allow mobile operators and financial institutions to focus on their core business, while leaving the management of their mobile money service to Visa.”

This new platform is built on Fundamo’s technology, the mobile money technology bought over by Visa in 2011, which has been deployed in more than 30 countries.

Image Credit: The New Times

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Happenin from Korean startup greySox is the Twitter for photos

Happenin is a social networking service from Korean mobile app maker greySox that focuses on photo sharing with a geographic dimension.

Want to find out what’s happening? Social media services like Facebook, Twitter and the like will let you check out recent trends and discussions through blurbs of text (Twitter) or a richer mix of text and multimedia (Facebook). Some would even focus on your location (Foursquare) But let’s say we limit the social stream to just photos and your location. What do we get? This is just what mobile app called Happenin aims to be.

“Happenin feeds you what’s happening around the world right now. In fact, users can post only the photos taken at the moment, and this is precisely the reason we call ourselves the only photo sharing application where everything is truly live.”

Happenin focuses on the “liveness” of images, which allows users to follow the visual stream on a real-time basis. Happenin lets users share photos with friends (a la Instagram), but an added dimension is the ability to discover photos by location. Apart from letting friends share photos, Happenin also has these discovery and sharing features:

• Channels – These can either be private or public, and members can use channels to exchange photos with each other.
• Broadcast – Users can re-share other users’ Happenin photos — something equivalent to the “Share” or “retweet” function in other social networks.
• Trending – This feature shows the top 100 popular photos in the world, in one’s country or locale.

Happenin is from South Korean mobile developer greySox Inc., makers of mobile games String Trio, Drum Meister, Finger Stomp and more. beSuccess notes that Happenin can be one regional social media service that can make it big globally, because of the idea that images can transcend language barriers. As such, while text-based microblogging services like Twitters and the various Weibo services from China are largely confined within language groups, Happenin can get users across borders connected.

Happenin is a free download from the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.

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CARTES Asia conferences held in Hong Kong this March

CARTES Asia and E-Commerce Asia will happen this March, and see top-level speakers from international corporations. The conferences will talk about e-commerce and digital marketing, especially within Asia.

From the 27th to 28th March this year, Hong Kong will see three conferences held by CARTES Asia, a smart technologies leading event in the Asia Pacific region, and organised by Comexposium. This year, the conferences will cover digital marketing and e-commerce rather substantially.

This two-day event will discuss and address many of the current issues like smartcards and terminals, contactless applications cloud security, and see top-notch speakers like Gavin Ho, head of mobile at Visa (Hong Kong), Lisa Watson, the segment manager at Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific, and Marc De Lange, director of finance, services and technology sectors at TNS.

The concurrently held CARTES Asia conference will feature some 40 seminars with speakers from global corporations like Datacard, Oberthur, Oracle, Sony, Thales e-security and Visa.

According to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, around 85 percent of transactions in Singapore use “e-money” or SVFs and around seven percent involve other cards, like credit and debit cards, gift cards and discount cards. Research conducted by Datamonitor last year indicates that two out of three Singaporean consumers are interested in using their mobile device as a payment tool. 23 percent of all Singaporeans said that they are very interested in using their mobile phone to make payments in shops, while 47 percent noted that they are quite interested.

This will also be the fourth edition of the global conference, CARTES Asia, and the first time E-commerce Asia will take place at the AsiaWorld-Expo.

Michael Weatherseed, the director of Security Events, Comexposium, Paris and organizer of CARTES Asia and E-Commerce Asia said, “CARTES Asia and E-Commerce Asia are the events to source suppliers of cutting edge payment technology and a great research base to gather knowledge on future trends.”

He also added that CARTES Asia rewards innovation through the Asia SESAMES Awards.

Eric Tan, general manager of business development and operations at Watchdata, Singapore, said, “Watchdata has been honored to receive two SESAMES Awards for our newest solutions from CARTES Asia in the past three years. We’re grateful for their enthusiastic support for research and innovation in the global smartcard industry and look forward to participating every year.”

e27 readers will get a discount of 15 percent off tickets to CARTES Asia and E-commerce Asia with the following code: PARCA13

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THE Collection: Startups and Apps for the Single and Ready to Mingle

Image: Higherthoughts.com

For most startups, it’s Thursday. But just in case some of you out there are looking forward to a bit of two timing, there’s plenty of help. No. We don’t mean the escort services, the porn peddlers or the marriage portals. We are talking about startups that help you find a real date or maybe just a Fraand (sic).

Pairbuddy: Pairbuddy just launched its public version. People find it difficult to make the first move to begin a relationship because they fear losing their good friend and getting rejected. On PairBuddy, people can add a friend to their secret crush list. If their friend also adds them to his/her secret crush list, both of them will be notified. It makes online dating extremely simple, fun and risk free.

StepOut.com: This site first started in 2008 in New York as Ignighter.com. It calls itself India’s number 1 place to meet new people and says that it has more than 4 million registered users. The company claims that over 40 % of users are women. Google India’s chief Rajan Anandan and a few others have together invested $3 million in the company which was first founded in the US and then moved to India as its founders noticed major traction from this part of the world. Besides features like Free chat, the site offers some premium features and virtual goods.

Floh: This Bangalore based site is taking a totally different route to dating. Fact is, its not even a traditional dating site. Floh is a platform to bring single people together at awesome events with the objective of meeting like minded people and is an invite only network. We’d written about Floh sometime back when it was about 1 year old and had several hundreds paying members. Its hard to imagine a premium service which charges a membership fee of Rs 7,500 for 3 months having hundreds of paying customers and a long queue of people waiting to sign up. Read more about Floh here.

QuackQuack.in: These guys launched last year. The idea is to keep it real and clean i.e. the site focuses on bringing ‘real/genuine’ users (and not fake profiles) and is solely aimed at Indian users. We are told that it’s truly a hassle for an Indian single to go online and find someone genuine to date with. They either end up in the arms of bots, porn peddlers or the matchmakers. Once you register on QuackQuack, you can send blinks, waves or short messages that are templatized and chat with others. The site has premium offering which enables users to send personalized waves among other things. Read more about QuackQuack here.

Twomangoes is an Indian site which proclaims “No stalkers, No Creeps” on its front page. Clearly, they understand the problems of single people on the Internet. Give it a shot and see if you get lucky.

Ditto is another option for you. The site seems to be doing pretty good. Its is a platform for single people to form “meaningful connections with those who share similar interests, tastes, passions, ideologies and points of view.” Well don’t we all love these meaningful platforms.

DateIITians: Supposing you are one of the folks believe that IITian’s have an extra whatever, you should log on to DateIITians.com. Its a social dating site founded by three IITians last year. Oh wait, that site is down. Well so much for loving an IITian.

Enough with dating services. Lets look at a couple of other things.

Send voice greetings to your cupid this Valentine’s day using GreetZAP App: The Android app introduces concept of voice cards and enables users to record their feelings and emotions and send it to their loved ones through physical voice cards delivered at recipient’s doorstep. A similar iPhone app is on the way. For those who don’t have an Android phone, try out their website (link) or their mobile site (link).

Also, don’t forget to check out some of the Valentine’s day apps for Android and OVI that we covered last year. There’s Valentine Radio which has a list of shoutcast and icecast radio stations that play romantic music non-stop all the time (link). Nubes should check out some dating tips on this Android app.

Related posts:

1. Valentine’s Day Apps For Android and OVI Stores [Best of Apps]
2. 5 Android Apps For Students [Appnomy Collection]
3. Android Apps For Health Freaks [Appnomy Collection]

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Backed by DMP, WearYouWant Aims to Ride on Thailand’s E-Commerce Growth

Thailand’s WearYouWant is a B2B2C fashion e-commerce site. That means, it helps other retailers to feature and sell their products to consumers online. It was founded in October 2011 by Julien Chalté and Martin Toft Sørensen, when both founders saw that Thailand would eventually need an online platform for shops to sell things online, particularly in the fashion sector. Chalté told me:

The Thai people are getting more and more educated in the use of new technologies. We felt an increasing demand for finding a larger variety of products online, so bringing end-users from all over Thailand in touch with the “Fashion Mecca” provided in Bangkok became a necessity.

WearYouWant generates revenue from two sources. First, by charging a signup fee from retailers to put their products online and providing services including professional product photos with models, online inventory management, customer service, and also a payment system. Second, WearYouWant also charges a commission for every item sold.

In Thailand, Sanook’s Sabuy.com and Rakuten’s Tarad.com are also in the B2B2C e-commerce space, though both sites sell a broader range of stuff and not just fashion items. Both sites are apparently pretty popular in Thailand too. When asked about competition from the big boys, Chalté remarked:

Anyone selling the same brands or fashion products in general will be considered as our competitor. However, both Sabuy and Tarad have a more Amazon appearance with a broad offer, where we target only one segment, which is fashion. We strongly believe that people who are looking for fashion will prefer a merchant which is dedicated to it. By having around 800 different brands and more than 20,000 different items in catalog, no doubt that we have a richer choice and a more fashion-centered approach than any Amazon-like platform.

Similar to many other B2B2C e-commerce sites including Tmall, Sabuy.com, and Tarad.com, WearYouWant also follows the drop shipping supply chain model. By adopting drop shipping, Chalte said that it need not worry about the logistics problem and that allows his team to focus solely on finding customers for merchants on WearYouWant and also on delivering high quality customer service.

WearYouWant currently has 15 people people ranging from service to business development people. The Bangkok-based startup is backed by Digital Media Partners (DMP) and also other undisclosed investors.

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Next UnCafe Topic: Inbound Marketing [Virtual Event, Feb 15th]

The last edition of UnCafe was a great success with insightful discussion around SAAS business and while the first meetup was quite horizontal in nature, we are going deep from now onwards. That is, take a topic, bring practitioners and have everybody share their experience/solve the puzzle.

Next UnCafe: Friday. Feb 15th, 2013, 3-4:30 PM.

Topic: Inbound Marketing.

Location: Virtual event. Yes, that was a major requirement from entrepreneurs outside Bangalore. So this is going to be a virtual event , but as always invite-only.

Who should attend? If you have experimented a lot with Inbound marketing, have a thing to share, have got a lot of unanswered questions, simply fill in the form (towards the end of this post). Our team will get back with next steps.

About UnCafe Meetups

UnCafe meetup are meant to bring selected entrepreneurs who come together to discuss/share insights under the context of the topic. The UnCafe concept is supported by Accel Partners and is primarily an invite-only/closed-door event.

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Accel Partners: Ask Accel Anything

As part of UnCafe initiative, you get an opportunity to ask Accel partners anything with respect to the topic and we will collate the answers and publish them as posts. You can start posting questions on NextBigWhat.com/forum (tag: ask-accel) or simply use the form here to ask a question to Accel Partners (current topic: SAAS).

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Related posts:

1. Announcing UnCafe Topic: “Finding Product Market fit for SaaS companies in India”
2. Announcing Monthly themes (SaaS) + UnCafe Events in partnership with Accel Partners
3. Uncafe Notes : SAAS, Inbound Marketing, Indian Customers and more..

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Tokyo Becomes Asia’s First YouTube Space Location

YouTube announced today the opening of Asia’s first YouTube Space in Tokyo. The Space can be used free of charge as a collaboration and production facility for all members of YouTube partner program, particularly those living in Japan and Asia-Pacific region.

Located inside the Roppongi Hills complex, the Tokyo Space seems to have everything a creator needs to build an awesome video. The place has three production studios, an equipment room (with cameras, lights, mics, and other equipments available to be used), a training/screening room, and resources for post-productions like editing systems and voice-over recording booths. Vice president, global head of content operations Tom Pickett comments:

We built the YouTube Space Tokyo as a way to support the incredible wave of Japanese creativity we have seen develop among our YouTube Partners over the last few years. The Space is an investment in these creators to support their quest to make even better videos and build even bigger global audiences.

Interested creators can start to file their applications to use the Space starting April 1st. TechCrunch mentioned that accepted applicants can use the production facilities for up to three months. You can check more information about the Tokyo Space here. And you can also find more resources for creators here.

Besides acting as a place to build videos, the YouTube Space Tokyo will also host live-streamed music sessions and Google+ Hangouts from time to time, with R&B artist JUJU holding the first live concert tomorrow night. While the Tokyo Space is the first of its kind in Asia, YouTube has built two other in London and Los Angeles last year.

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Of Relationship 2.0, Evolution of Technology and Social Networks

[Editorial notes: First of all, we would like to wish our readers a happy valentine's day. As part of the days' celebration, we are bringing in practical insights from the field and here is a guest post by SIddhart Mangharam. Siddharth Mangharam is the Founder and CEO of Floh, an online-offline hybrid network that connects singles in real life. In this guest post, he discusses how the relationship space has rapidly evolved over the last few years and the role that technology and social networks play.].

At Floh, our goal is simple: We connect singles in real life. We obsess about understanding singles in India and we’ve learnt a bunch of things in interacting with thousands of singles.

As an urban society, we’re moving from a purely traditional ‘arranged marriage’ scenario to an ‘I’d like to get to know this person a bit more’ mode. Singles value the freedom to find a partner on their own and really want to get to know each other better before taking the plunge.

Relationship 2.0

However, in this hyper connected age there’s a conundrum: If people want to get to know each other better, they need to spend time together in person. But that’s not happening. Since they’re always online and always connected, they end up spending hours sifting through thousands of profiles online – and they end up having a deeper relationship with their computers (or iPhones) than with each other!

We have also learnt that in addition to checking out the Facebook profile of someone they are interested in (no surprises here), singles also check out LinkedIn profiles! This indicates a couple of things. Firstly, LinkedIn is a trusted source of information. Few people would misrepresent their professional lives on a public site, since pretty much everybody can view the information. Secondly, LinkedIn actually has a lot of interesting information about a person – their education, their work history, the cities and countries they have worked in as well as their professional accomplishments. This is totally relevant to a person who may be interested in them!

However, checking out a man or a woman online encourages ‘profile shopping’. When two people meet in person, the chances of a connection are infinitely higher. A real person doesn’t come with a list of likes and dislikes that you may see on their Facebook profile, or on LinkedIn or even on a matrimonial site that ostensibly caters to helping people find a partner. Rather, people in real life have a smile, a personality and a presence that enables the other person to build personal chemistry with them.

Companionship is a basic human condition and humans spend a tremendous amount of energy in finding ‘The One’. The existing method of meeting online via a listing service (i.e. a matrimonial site) is passé. With rich social information available at everyone’s fingertips, relationships 2.0 is something waiting to cause some serious disruption. Watch this space for more!

Related posts:

1. Social networks and Human behavior – Why few social networks are successful?
2. Catch up with your network of Social Networks
3. Netizens prefer Social Networks over Porn Sites

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Local entrepreneurship in Singapore remains strong, over 56K new businesses formed in 2012

Singapore sees local entrepreneurship thriving despite an economic downturn in 2012, with a 22 percent increase in business formations in the ‘Computer Programming and Consultancy Services’ industry.

According to the Singapore Business Formation Statistics Report 2012 just released by Janus Corporate Solutions, confidence in starting new businesses in Singapore continued to remain strong with a reported 2.5 percent increase of locally owned enterprises in 2012 when compared to 2011.

The report noted that policy makers have introduced a number of initiatives recently to build a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem locally. Some of these noteworthy developments include proposed amendments to the Companies Act, such as making more funding, mentorship, and networking opportunities available for budding entrepreneurs, and new programmes to help children and teenage be more entrepreneurial.

Statistics show that new business formations added up to 56,681 in 2012, registering a small increase from the 55,699 business formations in 2011.

The number of private limited company registrations also saw an increase of six percent during 2012 and made up 55 percent of all businesses registered last year. In terms of business formations by industry, the report pointed out a significant increase of 22 percent in ‘Computer Programming and Consultancy Services’.

The report also identified a healthy increase in the number of foreign company registrations from certain countries, including a 264 percent rise in the number of Chinese companies and a 51 percent rise in the number of Japanese companies. A foreign company can either have a branch office or a subsidiary company in Singapore.

There was also an increase in the number of companies with individual shareholders from France, Australia and Japan by 65 percent, 29 percent and 27 percent respectively.

Jacqueline Low, the Chief Operating Officer of company registration agency, Janus Corporate Solutions, said, “Singapore attracts foreign businesses because it is well positioned within the global economy. The country offers low taxation and superb ease of doing business, which are a big draw for businesses from both developing and established countries. Its free trade access provides opportunities for companies from China and other countries to penetrate more markets as economic growth in their home economies slow down.”

The report also suggests that since there is an increase of the number of head officers and management consultancy companies, there is a larger need for companies providing IT services in Singapore.

Image Credit: Future Gov

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Nimbuzz releases messaging app for Blackberry 10

With popular cross-platform, Nimbuzz, released for the Blackberry 10, users can get free access to multiple features, such as integrated messaging and an international marketplace. 

Nimbuzz today announced the launch of the free eponymous messaging app for the new Blackberry 10. After being redesigned, this app is the only one in the market to integrate GTalk, Yahoo and Facebook Messenger into one single Blackberry app. That will also allow Blackberry users to send unlimited chat messages and share multimedia files across all mobile devices.

Nimbuzz is currently available on many major platforms like Android, iOS, Symbian, J2ME, Windows Phone and Windows and Mac computers. The launch of this cross-platform app will give Blackberry users an alternative to the traditional Blackberry Messenger which is only available for Blackberry customers.

Blackberry has also selected Nimbuzz as a pre-launch recipient of its brand new SDK, offering advanced tools and resources to maximise the impact of the app across all Blackberry 10 devices.

According to ABI Research, more than 20 million smartphones are projected to run on Blackberry 10 by 2013. Nimbuzz, lending its extended reach of more than 100 million users globally, will provide device users, including PlayBook, free access to multiple features, such as integrated messaging and chatrooms, an entertainment-focused international marketplace, multimedia sharing and direct linking to Twitter and Facebook without leaving the app.

Vikas Saxena, CEO of Nimbuzz, said, “Blackberry must continue to identify and promote the most successful and unique apps that already reach millions of users worldwide – this focus on advanced functionality and developer engagement will be a catalyst to the platform’s success.”

Currently, BlackBerry has a total of almost 80 million users in 90 countries worldwide. According to predictions by Forrester, by June, 200 carriers will adopt the new BlackBerry handsets worldwide.

Image Credit: Trade Arabia

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