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 ...
Tag Archives: zynga
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![Ogilvy’s ‘Social Media Equivalents’ in China 2011 [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/themes/penn2/thumb.php?src=wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Social-Media-In-China_EN_Oct2011-300.jpg&w=250&h=250&zc=1&q=90)
Jan 10 2012
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INDOMOG Aims to Solve Indonesia’s Online Payment Woes
Payment gateways have always been a curse for the Indonesia online ecosystem. We spoke with Wendy Vega, the founder and owner of INDOMOG which has done exceptionally well in terms of revenue, and it has also won the top award from GEPI, the Global Entrepreneurship Program Indonesia . 1. Can you briefly tell us what INDOMOG is? INDOMOG is an abbreviation for Indonesia Multionline Payment Gateway. We are an online payment system which connects merchants to customers. 2. INDOMOG is the big especially for online games payments. Are you guys focusing on ...
Dec 29 2011
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HappySNS Builds Social Games On Facebook, Tencent, Kaixin. Has 30 Million Monthly Active Users
HappySNS is a social gaming company that build games for Tencent, Facebook, and Chinese social network Kaixin001. According to the company’s statistics, it has a whopping 100 million installs, 30 million MAUs (monthly active users) and 10 million DAUs (daily active users). Its games are hosted across most major social network platforms, including Facebook, Tencent, Kaixin, DeNA, and Renren. I gave its Fishing Paradise a try on Facebook and I must say it has successfully kept me glued to Facebook for quite a while. The game, as its title suggests, allows ...
Nov 1 2011
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Is Evernote the Anti-Zynga? Phil Libin at Disrupt Beijing
This is a part of our TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 event coverage. #15:05: And we're back for another "fireside chat" sans the fire. This one is Sarah Lacy talking with Phil Libin of Evernote. It's called "Building the Anti-Zynga." #15:06: Sarah Lacy compliments Evernote, says it's the only thing she uses every day. Libin says that was their goal. Why are they called "the anti-zynga"? Libin says this comes from an offhanded comment he made. When people have downtime (i.e., in two or three minutes) they have a choice: kill some time, ...
Oct 17 2011
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Ogilvy’s ‘Social Media Equivalents’ in China 2011 [INFOGRAPHIC]
The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology. Ogilvy’s Asia Pacific arm has recent republished its ‘China Social Media Equivalants’ chart. One of the most notable changes since the last time the group published this graphic is in the SNS/Microblogging section, where a couple of Weibos (Sina and Tencent) straddle both classifications. The graphic is pretty solid, I think, with our only suggested addition being social games. But then again, is there a Chinese answer to a company like Zynga? Not yet, ...
Oct 13 2011
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Zynga To ‘Hire Aggressively’ For Its Bangalore Office
We reported back in March about social game developer Zynga and its plans to double its Bangalore office staff from 100 to 200 employees. And today we’re hearing via an Economic Times report that the company has plans for more aggressive hiring at that location. The report cites CTO Cadir Lee as saying that the company is bringing in more engineers and game designers. Lee added that “India is a strategic R&D center” for Zynga. The company also announced the global launch of Mafia Wars 2 this week, which sees the ...
Aug 3 2011
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Singapore Spends More on Facebook Games, But Some Not Aware of Virtual Currency
Online payment provider MOL has conducted an extensive survey among Singaporeans on Facebook to learn more about the nation’s social gaming habits. The results show that Singapore is pretty serious about it casual gaming, spending more money than most of its Asian neighbors. MOL put a number of questions to Facebook users, each one receiving a varying amount of responses. Not surprisingly, students make up the majority of the social gaming audience, or 84 percent of 3378 respondents. As for spending, 41 percent of 3657 respondents say they have used Facebook ...
Jul 26 2011
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Zynga’s Chinese CityVille Coming to Tencent
Tencent gamers have news to be happy about today — Zynga’s CityVille is about to become available in simplified Chinese and will be hosted on Tencent’s Pengyou.com platform. The new localized initiative in China will be called Zynga City - a smart way to get Chinese gamers familiar with the Zynga brand. Other Tencent platforms like QZone will follow suit in the near future. Zynga's full announcement is below, but here’s an excerpt of how Zynga City will attempt to localize: Zynga city will include brand-new decorations and architecture the Chinese ...
Jun 16 2011
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Stream Media Partners With MOL For More Mobile Payment Options
Singapore-based start-up, Stream Media just announced its partnership with payment service provider MOL AccessPortal. Stream Media is the company behind MoVend, a mobile in-app billing platform. With this partnership Movend now offers MOLPoints, MOL’s virtual currency, as a mobile payment option for users to purchase apps on Android platform. See the flow chart and video below for a detailed explanation. The partnership is huge for Stream Media. You may remember MOL as the company that acquired Friendster, whose patents were eventually sold to Facebook. MOL is also the company that manages ...
May 2 2011
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What Start-up would you Build with $5 Million?
At the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) last week, the moderator posted an interesting question to the panel: what would you build if you had $5 million in your pocket now? Turned out, most of the panelists voted for social e-commerce. Steven Goh of Mig33 led the discussion as he explained that there are a lot to explore in this young social commerce sector. The social e-commerce is likely to follow the same growth trend as social gaming. Without a doubt, social gaming is leading the social ecommerce front as it ...
Mar 30 2011
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DST to Invest in Chinese Online Retailer 360buy.com
Russian investment group DST (Digital Sky Technologies) has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Chinese online shopping website 360buy.com, according to a Reuters report. DST has previously invested in companies like Facebook and Zynga. 360Buy, which focuses primarily on business-to-customer (B2C) online commerce, has been often likened to Amazon. It is rivaled by Alibaba's Taobao, which has over 370 million users, although the nature of their respective businesses vary slightly. It was reported this past December that retail giant Wal-Mart had invested $500 million in 360buy. Subsequently the Chinese ...
Mar 14 2011
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Zynga to Double Indian Staff to 200, Taps Bollywood Talent
The creator of FarmVille and Mafia Wars, Zynga, is on an expansion spree. Zynga will hire 100 people in addition to the 100 employed in its Bangalore office in India. The Indian office is also Zynga's first outside of U.S. "About half the new employees would be game developers, the people who do the actual "coding" of the games," Colleen McCreary, Zynga's human resources chief told Reuters. So, where do Zynga get talent from? The answer is Bollywood. Shan Kadavil, Zynga's India manager was full of praise for the creative talents in Bollywood. ...
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DropMySite.com Backups Your Website, Email, and Database in the Cloud
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