Despite a tough year for many group buying sites in China - including lots of terrible publicity such as huge spikes in customer complaints - lots of consumers turned to such deals sites for their most important event of the year: Chinese New Year dinner. The deals aggregator Tuan800 has revealed that in China’s 10 biggest cities, people snapped up 734 ‘Year of the Dragon’ dinner deals that sold 54,000 times, amounting to a total of 2.97 million RMB (US$470,000) worth of festive food. That represents growth of 940 percent since ...
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Jan 23 2012
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What is GREE Doing in Southeast Asia? [PREVIEW]
Arch-rival DeNA was one step ahead of GREE entering the Southeast Asia market. It’s kind of self-explanatory why GREE is also taking an interest in this region, as there is so much potential in regions like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. But GREE isn’t just eyeing the social gaming space. If you’re an avid reader of the blog, you may recall that a $25 million investment fund, GREE Ventures, was recently established to invest in Southeast Asian startups, especially in Indonesia. That certainly caught our interest. Through our conversations with GREE, we ...
Jan 22 2012
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AllSet Learning Launches Chinese Grammar Wiki
AllSet Learning is an educational consultancy startup based in Shanghai, China. Today, AllSet has entered the tech realm by launching a Chinese grammar wiki. The wiki, which contains explanations and examples of Chinese grammar points organized by level of difficulty, is licensed with a Creative Commons license, which means that although it was created by AllSet, it can be used and shared by anyone interested in learning Chinese. AllSet Founder John Pasden told us: I'm really hoping that learners all over the world will find it useful, and that some of ...
Jan 21 2012
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GREE Partners With RightScale, Offers Multi-Cloud Management System to Developers
Japan-based social gaming network GREE (TYO:3632) and U.S-based cloud computing management company RightScale jointly announced a partnership yesterday. Under this partnership developers will have the flexibility to host their servers on any cloud vendor of preference — all under RightScale’s platform. This partnership will also help to reduce operational load as it enables large-scale systems management by smaller groups of people. RightScale will also offer premium support services at no cost to GREE’s development partners. RightScale has an impressive list of clients which include PBS, Harvard University, Zynga, and Sling Media. While many gamers ...
Jan 21 2012
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Kompas Invests in Urbanesia, Becomes a Major Shareholder
Early this week Kompas, Indonesia’s biggest national newspaper, invested in Urbanesia to deliver a keynote. This investment by Kompas could prove to be vital as they are looking to expand to hyperlocal news. We spoke with Selina Limman, the CEO of Urbanesia.com, to find out more about this: 1. Is this an acquisition? Is Kompas getting a majority share here? KCM (Kompas Cyber Media) sees a lot of potential in Urbanesia in terms of user base (youth and lifestyle focus) and business model. In addition the nature of the product in terms ...
Jan 24 2012
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Looking For Japanese Tech Companies in Singapore? Check Out Crosscoop
Smack right in the center of Singapore at 80 Robinson Road, Crosscoop is a 8,000 square foot hotspot where you can find over 40 Japanese companies. The founder of Crosscoop, Motofumi Shoji, claims that 60 percent of Crosscoop Singapore’s companies are tech-related, including DeNA, Recruit, mediba, Kenko, @Freaks, and GREE. Crosscoop first originated in Japan, and Shoji explained that his Singapore office is — as he put it — “more high-class.” We have seen a sudden burst of Japanese companies flocking into the Southeast Asian market in recent months, most of them ...
Jan 20 2012
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China Has No Innovation? Look Closer
I gave a sharing session at the National University of Singapore last Wednesday about my experience living in China for a year. I am currently in my last semester at NUS majoring in Communications and New Media, with a very fun minor in ‘Technopreneurship.’ In order to obtain my Technopreneurship minor, I opted for a global immersion project called the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) program. In my case, I was attached to an Innovation Works’ invested startup called XingCloud, and took courses at Tsinghua University. Before I could even share ...
Jan 20 2012
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Build to Serve, Build to Earn, Don’t Build to Sell
From time to time people would say that here in Singapore or Southeast Asia we needed a big money exit – you know, like X acquires Y for $100 million. That would inspire folks to step out and build businesses, because let's face it, who wouldn’t want to get out with bags of money. But the idea of building a business to sell kind of sucks . While there’s nothing wrong selling a business, the mentality of starting a business and gearing it up to get acquired one day isn’t ...
Jan 19 2012
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Japan’s FC2 Video Site Launches in Indonesia, Minus the Sexy Bits
Heard of FC2 Video? I hadn’t, but I know them now. FC2 Video is an online video streaming site similar to YouTube, and is apparently pretty popular in Japan. Alexa ranks FC2.com (including its full range of portals) the third most-trafficked website in Japan. Included in that is FC2’s very popular blog platform, which comScore says is the country’s leader in that space. And now the company’s online video service has launched in Indonesia. It’s good news for folks who enjoy watching and sharing mobile-supported videos. After taking a quick look, ...
Jan 19 2012
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Enter the Snapdragon: Qualcomm Sees 32% of Revenue From China
Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), the America-based mobile chip maker, has said that China now accounts for 32 percent of its revenue, more than any other Asian nation. The figure comes from financial data for the fiscal year 2011, revealed by CEO Paul Jacobs. Its revenue in the last fiscal year hit US$14.96 billion - up 36 percent on 2010’s total - as yet more people bought smartphones, many of which are powered by Qualcomm’s chips. These include the 1GHz Snapdragon that’s inside Samsung’s (005930:KS) Galaxy S, which was China’s most popular Android smartphone ...
Jan 20 2012
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Singapore’s ‘ACE’ to Provide S$25M to Seed 500 Startups, Removes Age Limit [UPDATED]
Update (Jan 20): We received a correction update from ACE that it aims to support 500 startups under its Startups scheme. Each startup could receive up to S$50,000 in grants which sums up to S$25 million in total possible investment. We have good news for our Singaporean friends in the startup community. The chairman of Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE), Mr Teo Ser Luck, announced at a press conference today that ACE will be providing seed capital to a target of 500 startups. So if each startup receives about S$50,000+, then the ...
Jan 20 2012
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Meituan is China’s King of the Deals, Ending 2011 On a High
The Chinese group-buying site Meituan has ended 2011 as the market leader in this highly competitive sector in the month of December. And so if we look back at the previous year, Meituan can be crowned the daily deals king in China by a tiny fraction from its main rival, Lashou. These stats come from the group buy aggregator and analytics company, Dataotuan. For the December figures it looked at 125 deals sites across 345 cities. Last month saw the further rise of 55Tuan, rising to be second in terms of market ...
Qihoo Says Apple is Re-approving Its iOS Apps, Drama Over
Feb 7, 2012
Beepmo: A New LBS Social Network for Professionals in Asia
Feb 7, 2012
Shanghai Boy Imitates Mobile Game, Jumps Off Five-Story Building
Feb 7, 2012
James Tong: How IDA and Gobi Ventures Help Startups Expand Into China
Feb 7, 2012
Beijing School Begins Using iPads in the Classroom
Feb 7, 2012