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 ...
Tag Archives: Asia
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![31 Percent of Most Innovative Companies are From Asia [Report]](http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/reuters-top-100-250x250.jpg)
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Jan 2 2012
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Happy Holidays! Now Here’s What We Want…
With the holidays upon us, many of us probably have our eyes set on some new high-tech purchase, and the writers here at PO are no exception. Here is a quick run down from a just few of our team members about what they have on their wishlists. Willis Wee (Singapore) A Dropbox account with 100GB of space maybe. I would also want a 13-inch MacBook Air with all the possible upgrades. And if it’s not too much to ask from Santa Claus, I would love to have a ...
Dec 1 2011
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More Evidence of Mobile Gaming on the Rise in Asia
We recently wrote about how app downloads in China have reportedly increased since Apple began accepting local currency payments. Today there’s more evidence of mobile app fever on the Asian continent, most specifically games, as Barron’s is citing the app analytics specialists at App Annie in a report that says both China and Japan are seeing a mobile gaming boom: uring the past six months Japan grew 35 percent over the previous six months, and China grew 30 percent, while the U.S. was down because of a shift in ...
Nov 15 2011
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31 Percent of Most Innovative Companies are From Asia [Report]
Thomson Reuters has released its list of Top 100 Global Innovators, and we here at Penn Olson were pretty curious to see where Asia stacks up on its list. So looking past big tech names like Apple, Intel, and IBM we see a number of prominent Asian companies like LG, Samsung, Konami, Sharp, and Sony. As for which countries dominate the top 100, the USA is way ahead with 40 percent, although Japan is close behind with 27 percent of the top 100 companies. South Korea is the only other ...
Nov 1 2011
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A Peek at Asia’s Email through Yahoo’s Mail Visualization Project
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that we like fun visualizations. So when we came across Yahoo’s shiny new Mail Visualization Project just now, we couldn’t help but stop and play around for a while. It’s actually kind of cool, in that it shows the flow of email sent and received, showing the most common words (that Yahoo says are anonymized). The flow of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ email here is interesting to watch. If our run-through is any indication, the spam protection is not air-tight, given the ...
Oct 26 2011
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More Thoughts on Innovation in Asia, This Time From Serkan Toto
After Charlie’s piece yesterday on innovation and what’s really cool in tech start-ups, I thought it would be fitting to point out Serkan Toto’s presentation on innovation in Asia, just in case some of you might have missed it. For those of you who read this blog, you’ll already know Serkan as an authority on technology in Japan and Asia, as we’ve cited his articles more than a few times. In his presentation Serkan sheds some common misconceptions about the practice of cloning in Asia, and he mentions a number ...
Oct 25 2011
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Publishing Tools to Share: TextMate Snippets for Stock Tickers and Live Blogging
We like to experiment with new publishing tools here at PO. And like many of the start-ups we cover, our team has to try to figure out the best way to work efficiently on a limited budget. We use an assortment of free/low-cost tools to add graphs, maps, videos, weird anchor links — basically anything that we think might add value for readers. Most recently we started adding stock/ticker symbols in our article text and meta data in an effort to provide and value to readers who want that information, ...
Oct 21 2011
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New Social Media Insights for Retailers in Asia [REPORT]
Simon Kemp of We Are Social Singapore sent us along an interesting report on the role of social media in retail in the Asia Pacific region. With 93 slides, the presentation is worth a look, particularly the latter part where it looks at interesting campaigns from companies like IKEA, Uniqlo, Diesel, Starbucks, and Tesco. We were particularly interested in the collection of facts and figures related to social media in Asia - some new, some not - but all, when viewed together, are pretty remarkable. Among those which stood out ...
Oct 19 2011
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Net Trends Report Shows Web Becoming More International, With Growing Asia Presence
There's an interesting new report out from report from KPCB on internet trends. Among other things, the report ranks 25 top global companies according to 2011 market value. While more than half of the top companies in that group are from the US, Asia is well represented. From China we have Baidu at the top with a $46 billion market value. It’s followed by Tencent, Netease, Alibaba, Ctrip, and Sina in that order. For Japan, we have Yahoo Japan and Rakuten representing, while NHN (which operates Naver) in the lone Korean ...
Sep 27 2011
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What Are Asia’s Top 50 Apps?
SingTel Innovation Exchange is searching for Asia’s top 50 apps for 2011. The idea is simple. If you’re the creator of an app, you can submit it here for voting. To view all submissions, you can head over to the voting site to check out the list of apps already on board. No login hassle, just vote. Also note that “apps” here means applications (duh) for both web and mobile. The list looks familiar so far. Many of the apps listed have been featured on PO too, including Roound, MobDis, MySellr, ...
Sep 9 2011
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179 Million Citizens: Asia’s 4th Largest Nation is Republic of Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC]
The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology. We’ve said much already about Facebook’s booming popularity in both Indonesia and India. But a fun infographic from the folks at Ogilvy attempts to put the growing numbers into new perspective. The graphic notes that Facebook has 179 million users in Asia, which — if it were a country — would make it the region’s fourth largest. Only China, India, and Indonesia have a higher population. Ogilvy’s Facebook graphic actually comes in two portions, ...
Aug 25 2011
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Caller ID App TrueCaller Nears Half a Million Users in India [INTERVIEW]
Ever since I’ve heard of it, TrueCaller has been a must-have phone app for me. It not only acts as a global caller ID, but also helps me block spam calls from strangers and tele-marketers. It has been only two years since its first release, but TrueCaller serves users in countries from all over the world and has a comprehensive crowd-sourced address book with millions of contacts in it. The TrueCaller team shared some interesting statistics with Penn-Olson: Users in India: 470,000 Users in Asia: 665,000 Users around the world: 1,600,000 Users on Symbian: ...
![Japan’s Social Giants: Trends in User Numbers [CHART]](http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IMG_5437-80x80.jpg)
Japan’s Social Giants: Trends in User Numbers [CHART]
Feb 8, 2012
Cazbak Partners With Giant E-commerce Sites, Gives Savings to Consumers in India
Feb 8, 2012
Perx’s ‘Chop Mob’ Helps Coffee Bean Increase 50% in Transaction
Feb 8, 2012
CyberAgent Ventures Invests in Vietnamese Music Service
Feb 7, 2012
DropMySite.com Backups Your Website, Email, and Database in the Cloud
Feb 8, 2012