SingTel announced in a press release today that it is acquiring GTW Holdings, the owners of HungryGoWhere, Singapore’s most visited foodie site, for S$12M (US$9.4M).

The site, which was started in 2007, has a presence in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Australia. Under the terms, GTW will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SingTel. It will merge operations with inSing.com, another SingTel subsidiary with an audience of two million customers.

With the purchase, SingTel claims it has the largest food and lifestyle audience in the island state.

GTW’s Singapore-based founders will play a crucial role in growing SingTel’s services in Singapore and beyond.

GTW will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SingTel. Its operations will be merged with inSing.com, also a subsidiary of SingTel, giving the combined portal an audience of 2 million customers, which SingTel claims makes it the largest food and lifestyle audience in Singapore.

GTW’s Singapore-based founders will continue to play an important role in expanding SingTel’s services in Singapore and internationally, according to the press release.

(Read our 2009 interview with Wong Hoong An, HungryGoWhere co-founder)

“A cornerstone of SingTel’s growth strategy is to build digital solutions that help consumers in their daily lives – as they live, work and play. Possessing the local knowledge and content is critical as it allows us to compete effectively in these areas,” said Allen Lew, CEO of SingTel’s Digital L!fe group.

“SingTel will continue to form partnerships for important and unique content, including in retail, entertainment and other lifestyle needs. The talented HungryGoWhere team has built a much-loved brand which has become the go-to site for restaurant reviews and information, delivering a great experience around one of Singapore’s favourite pastimes.” he said.

Dennis Goh, founder and managing director of HungryGoWhere, said: “This deal allows our award-winning content to be seen by even more people in the region and will accelerate the investment and distribution of our new online restaurant reservation system.”

SingTel plans to grow HungryGoWhere’s existing restaurant reservation system, TableDB, and help it scale across Asia. In Singapore, TableDB is competing with Chope and Reserveit.sg, which are the front-runners in the space.

The telecommunications company has been making a number of acquisitions in the digital media and advertising space of late. In March this year, it purchased US digital ads company Amobee for US$321M. In May, it bought AdJitsu, a 3D mobile advertising company.

Expect the Singapore giant to make more acquisitions in the coming months, especially in emerging markets. It has hinted that it will acquire non-phone businesses in China and India, in a move away from slow-growth markets in Singapore and Australia.

This means that you won’t see any front row VIPs scrutinizing the models up close. Yes, no Anna Wintour-type tastemakers or wealthy celebrities.

In addition, this fashion week will let live viewers pre-order their favorite looks immediately after they spot it on the runway, and have it delivered to their doorstep within weeks. The show will feature the Spring/Summer 2013 collections from Singapore’s distinguished designers, as well as an unannounced guest designer.

DFW is a company set up by Keyis Ng and Charina Widjaja, and both used to work under Singapore celebrity singer Dick Lee in the advertising industry. Keyis also runs STORM Creative Events Agency, a public relations company.

In addition to the live coverage of the show and the backstage buzz, DFW will interview designers, models, hair and makeup artists, as well as performers from fringe events, feature live commentaries by key fashion figures and pre-show performances by international artistes.

Fashionistas can also download a mobile app to check out the livestreams, videos, photos, and even shop for items.

Fashion designers will be able to receive immediate feedback, both good and bad, from viewers. Pre-orders made by customers will give fashion entrepreneurs quick market insights about the pieces that sell.

In conjunction with the fashion show, an online B2B platform called DFW Digital Showroom will also be launched. Designers will be able to display lookbook images and pre-recorded videos on the platform, which is targeted at the press, buyers, and retailers.

Keyis is aiming for seven million viewers for this inaugural show, and he plans to announce DFW for other major cities soon. This is not the first time he has live streamed a fashion event.

His previous project, Fashforward.com, gave users virtual front-row seats to traditional fashion events. In May 2011, he and his team garnered some 500,000 visitors from 90 countries within a week.

“We aim to harness technology and creativity to promote home-grown designers in each city to the global audiences by capitalizing on the hype generated from the fashion shows. The buzz created will then be directly converted into sales and sync the fashion communication cycle with its retail cycle,” he says.

While there’s no telling how DFW will perform — so much depends on execution — an event like this is a refreshing take on an elitist industry that is dependent on upper echelon tastemakers to set the tone for an entire season.

For example, critically acclaimed documentary The September Issue shows that a single woman, Anna Wintour, who is the authoritative editor-in-chief of American Vogue, can singlehandedly decide what will be trendy in a US$300B global industry. Young designers anointed by Anna are put on a fast track to success.

However, ground-up initiatives like the DFW turn the industry upside down by giving independent designers more visibility, and letting ordinary consumers be the tastemakers for once.

Is seven million viewers an attainable goal? Maybe not. But props to them for aiming high.

Started in February, the fund is a collaboration between KDDI, a major Japanese telecoms operator, and Global Brain, a VC firm. The fund will invest in companies in Asia, Japan, and the United States, providing not just funding but also service development, platform for cloud services, and promotional initiatives.

Global Brain sees Singapore as a center of their upcoming activities in Asia, having already partnered with the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre. They have been managing several corporate venture capital funds for 11 years.

Startups can apply for the fund through the Global Brain website.

Hear it from the industry leaders.

As mobile broadband adoption continues unabated in 2012, the telecom industry is facing a new era of opportunity and challenges to deliver a smooth experience in the increasingly important mobile cloud.

Listen to the chief protagonists in Singapore and Southeast Asia, from Google, StarHub, HP, Tellabs, Samsung and other distinguished speakers discuss a way forward, as apps demand increasingly more resources on networks as well as spectrum.

How can telcos deliver a smoother experience for consumers? Will there be enough spectrum to cater to machine-to-machine communications in future? Can users enjoy a truly unified interface for cloud services on the phone, tablet and PC?

Returning in its third year, Singapore’s independent seminar on future mobile and wireless trends, UNWIRED Conference 2012 will shed light on these issues. There will also be a demo of the first Windows 8 devices this year.

In previous events, more than 160 telecom executives, developers, academics, analysts and journalists participated in highly-interactive interactive discussions with panelists who shared their in-depth knowledge and experiences with the audience.

When: Thursday May 31, 2012
Time: 1pm – 5.30pm
Where: Angsana 3F, Level 3, Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre, 10 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore 018956

Register here.

The last time we saw mobile app Chatworthy was at DEMO Asia 2012, where Keeran Janin, co-founder of Brunei startup MeSixty, gave a pitch about the product they’re developing (watch a short video interview with Keeran at DEMO Asia).

Now, they have launched the iPad app as a public beta. Chatworthy lets users view and interact with any Instagram post around them. They can also select the location of the Instagram posts they want to view.

Users can then share these posts or chat privately with their friends. Other features of the app include:

• Push notifications and offline messaging
• View Instagram posts in full screen with support for the new iPad in retina resolution
• Like, Follow, Comment on Instagram posts and view your friends latest photos
• Bookmark posts to see them later and bookmark locations to check back for new posts
• Chatworthy generates your contact list based on your Instagram friends

For now, the app is only available to Instagram users. They will be adding support for Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr soon.

Chatworthy is similar to other location-based social discovery apps like US startups Banjo, which surpassed 1M users, and Gauss. Then there’s Highlight, Glancee, Sonar and Zaarly.

But while Banjo and Gauss main aim is to help users find friends that are nearby, Chatworthy is more focused on discovering and sharing content, especially photos.

MeSixty recently closed a round of funding from Singapore’s Accel-X, a venture capital fund that invests into early stage technology companies, in November last year. They are the second Brunei firm to receive funding from them, the first being Infindo Technology.

Both MeSixty and Infindo are incubatees at iCentre, an incubator for technology startups in Brunei.

Loyalty cards are inefficient and generate a lot of waste. Even digital ones. A while ago, I was at a music shop and decided to preorder a music album for a friend.

To my delight, I received two chops on Perx, a loyalty card app I recently featured. But to my dismay, I was eight chops away from getting my reward. And it’s extremely unlikely I’ll step into the store ever again — I’m just not an avid music listener.

Here’s the problem with loyalty cards: They don’t always capture loyal customers. And when they don’t, they’re a burden to merchants.

This is a problem Singapore-based startup Squiryl hopes to solve. Unlike other loyalty card apps, it allows users to swap stamps — or acorns, in their lingo — with one another.

Suppose I have two acorns at a restaurant I’ll never visit again. I can use the Trades feature to exchange acorns with others by putting up an offer. For example, I can offer two acorns from Fisherios Fish n Chips in exchange for three acorns at a Puma store.

While critics might argue that such trades defeat the purpose of loyalty cards since it diverts customers away, Squiryl co-founder Mulyadi Syariffudin disagrees.

“We gave up the [advertising] agency because we believe in burning our boats so that we can’t turn back.”

Customers who don’t like a product are unlikely to come back to the store anyway. So, why not exchange them for another customer who willingly traded for your acorns? With some acorns in hand, customers are more likely to visit a store since rewards are more easily attainable.

“If you lose one, you get another one. That’s the worst scenario. In the best situation, customers that get acorns spread the word, resulting in more sales for merchants,” he says.

While past apps have tried universal currency, merchants revolted because consumers can effectively get points at one brand and use it to redeem rewards at another. Acorns, on the other hand, are always tied to a merchant. They can only be used on one particular brand at a time.

The net effect is greater market efficiency. Instead of taking a slice of a small pie, Squiryl hopes to enlarge it by making the concept of loyalty points more relevant for customers.

They’re essentially hoping to do what Google did with Adsense: Making an entire industry more efficient, resulting in better returns for both merchants and consumers. Except that while Google is achieving this with algorithms, Squiryl is doing it with social exchange.

This social element is at the heart of Squiryl’s vision. Ultimately, they aim to be the universal social network for loyalty points — a fundamentally different approach from their competitor Perx, which is more of a marketing tool than anything else. Squiryl is working on more social features right now.

How Squiryl works:

Mulyadi was candid in his interview about competing with the more well-funded Perx, and how Squiryl lost out initially in the battle for merchants. Perx gained the advantage in Singapore with a clustering strategy — by targeting merchants in a particular area, those who didn’t use the app felt left out and wanted in too.

Even though Squiryl is forever free, merchants on Perx were hesitant to switch to another loyalty card program. Another painful lesson Mulyadi learnt was the importance of putting their product out there fast, even though it may be flawed.

Mulyadi also admits that Squiryl doesn’t have as much marketing muscle as their Saverin-funded competitor, and as such are less visible to consumers. This is painfully obvious to me — as I stroll around Singapore, the Perx logo is visible on storefronts everywhere, while Squiryl seems obscure.

But he and co-founder Alan Lee are a scrappy bunch: They’ve managed to amass 15,000 downloads and 6,000 monthly active users despite their constraints. About 100 store locations are on their program, issuing out a total of 9,400 acorns in March and April. They officially launched at DEMO Asia 2012 in March, six months after Perx.

Squiryl is determined to catch up. They have already set up an office in Indonesia and hired a sales team there. Their BlackBerry app will launch in a few days time, while their Android app will unveil in mid-June. They are working feverishly hard to get Indonesian merchants on board, aiming for 500 outlets and 150,000 users in Indonesia by November.

Mulyadi isn’t aware of any prominent mobile loyalty card app in Indonesia. Over there, the loyalty card scene is dominated by credit card programs, but he argues that these loyalty schemes build brand affinity for the credit cards rather than merchants.

It’s still too early to tell how the loyalty card battle will pan out. There’s still a lot of untapped retail real estate in Asia, and I’m curious to see who will be the first to develop loyalty programs for the white-hot mobile commerce industry. I’m also interested to see how Mobipoint and Spoqa will perform in South Korea.

The Squiryl team. Photo: Squiryl

For both Alan and Mulyadi, it’s a race not just against competitors, but against the clock. Both of them are married, and Mulyadi has four young daughters. Having bootstrapped all the way, the co-founders find themselves with a runway of six to twelve months.

Mulyadi himself was running an advertising agency before giving it up to pursue his dream. Alan is a serial entrepreneur who is proficient in web development.

“Me and Alan, we’re very particular, we gave up the agency because we believe in burning our boats so that we can’t turn back,” he says.

Their immediate concern for now isn’t revenue — but getting user traction. They’re also seeking the right investors, having previously rejected one who wanted Squiryl to scrape its trading program.

Having family commitments have imbued them with a sense of desperation — and this could work in their favor.

“We’re different from other startups because we’re no longer in our early twenties, so there’s more urgency for us. This thing has to work.”

2011 has turned out to be a breakout year for mobile commerce in Singapore, says PayPal‘s Online and Mobile Shopping Insights 2011 study.

The report has revealed that the country’s mobile commerce market has grown by 660 percent reach S$328M (US$259M) last year from S4$3M (US$33M) in 2010.

The study was conducted by The Nielsen Company online using a representative sample of 1,009 Singaporean online shoppers aged 18 and above. 482 of them are mobile shoppers, which in this study means that they have shopped or made purchases using a mobile phone or tablet.

The mobile commerce market is expected to grow ten-fold to reach S$3.1B (US$2.45B) in 2015, indicating that shopping on mobile devices has become mainstream due to the ubiquity of such devices.

More findings from the study below:

General consumer behavior

• Mobile shopping comprised about a quarter (23%) of all online shopping in 2011, nearly six times its share (4%) of the online shopping market in 2010.
• Mobile shoppers constituted close to half (48%) of all online shoppers in 2011, compared to about one in three (29%) in 2010.
• The median spend per head for mobile shoppers increased from S$93 (US$73)  in 2010 to S$354 (US$279) in 2011. There were 880,792 Singaporeans who made a purchase through a mobile device in 2011, compared to 364,390 in the previous year.
• The majority (75%) of purchases made using mobile devices were via smartphones.
• Singaporeans spent S$244M (US$193M) through their smartphones in 2011 – representing close to three-quarters of the total mobile commerce market – compared to S$82M (US$65)  through tablets.
• The average spend per head on tablets was S$380 (US$300), significantly higher than the average spend per head on smartphones, which amounted to S$274 (US$217) suggesting a growing market and potential for mobile shopping via web-enabled tablets.
• Four out of every ten purchases on both tablets and smartphones made at home.
• The office was the next common place to shop (18% of smartphone users and 11% of tablet users).
• Mobile shopping while commuting via bus or train or in transit was yet another preferred place for transactions (13% of smartphone users and 11% of tablet users).

Top spending categories for mobile shopping

Mobile shopping is much broader than just digital downloads with ‘fashion and accessories’ and ‘movie tickets’ seen as hot favorites for both smartphone and tablet shoppers.

• Almost a quarter of mobile shoppers indicated a desire to purchase fashion items, airline and movie tickets on-the-go with their smartphones indicating there is room for growth and that retailers have the opportunity to provide multi-channel shopping experiences in these categories.
• Tablet users exhibit a different set of preferences. Tablet users indicated they would like to purchase automotive goods and computer hardware. This suggests that compared to smartphone users, tablet owners are more likely to purchase higher ticket items on their devices due to the tablet’s larger screen size.

Graph: Top Mobile Spending Categories in 2011 in S$ millions

Shopping using QR codes
QR codes provide retailers the benefit of launching virtual pop-up stores across all channels and media and enable 24 by 7 mobile shopping to complement brick-and-mortar store locations.

• Quick Response (QR) codes are gaining popularity among Singapore smartphone shoppers. Four out of every ten smartphone users were aware of QR codes, and of those who were aware, 45 per cent had used QR codes for an average of eight transactions in 2011.
• The most common items purchased through QR codes were books, fashion items and computer hardware.
• Curiosity (33%) combined with ease-of-use (21%) were cited as the main drivers of QR code usage.
• PayPal’s QR code campaign with SMRT from February till April this year enabled an average of 500 transactions per 10,000 scans by Singaporean commuters, equivalent to a 5 per cent customer conversion rate, which is higher than the average direct email response rate of 1.7 per cent.
• Showbiz Asia saw huge mobile sales success by offering one-for-one tickets for award winning show WICKED to Singaporean commuters via this QR code campaign, resulting in close to five times increase in mobile ticket sales through PayPal as compared to sales for the same period pre-campaign.

Security concerns and lack of user-friendliness a barrier for consumers

While Singaporean consumers are increasing their mobile commerce spend exponentially, security concerns and the lack of user-friendliness were indicated as the main barriers towards greater adoption.

• 40 per cent of all mobile shoppers felt that mobile transactions were not safe enough.
• Other barriers to further adoption of smartphones for mobile shopping included “screen size is too small” and “Internet speed is slow.”

Photo: PayPal

While the official Facebook app allows for some basic Facebook Page management, it lacks a lot of key features. This new app has the ability to let social media managers post new updates and photos on their Pages, get push notifications about Page activity, view Page insights, and more.

The app is now available as a free download in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. More countries are expected to follow.

Take the app for a spin, let us know what you think and whether it is available in your country.

Technology startups are today’s entrepreneurial rockstars. Not a week goes by without an announcement of a new location-based app, niche social network, or online travel discovery service.

But like many hard-luck musicians, these startups burn bright at the beginning, relying on the quick fix of seed or venture funding, only to fade later on.

That’s because they are still searching for a business model, and until then, they can’t be legitimately called a sustainable business.

In the midst of this fever, Aunty Binnaz is an online service that stands out for modernizing an un-sexy industry — fortune-telling. Yes, I’m talking about psychic reading of the tarot-card, astrology sort.

Except in this case, Aunty Binnaz’s main product is coffee-cup reading, a popular form of fortune telling in Turkey.

Started in January 2011, the business is on track to generate an annual revenue of US$1M by doing “hundreds” of readings a day, says Turkish entrepreneur Sertac (pronounced sir-tarsh) Tasdelen, who’s also an Ernst & Young business consultant, fashion photographer, and part-time model.

He is based in Singapore, while his co-founder and CTO Kaya Diker works from the United States.

Aunty Binnaz’s business model is straightforward. It is a Turkish and English website that enables users to upload pictures of their empty coffee cups to any of the 30 carefully selected and listed fortune-tellers.

Customers pay a US$6 fee per reading, which can be received either via text or voice recording. Aunty Binnaz (which is actually branded after Sertac’s mum) keeps a share of the revenue.

The company, registered in Singapore, recently added Tarot card and Astrology readers to their ranks, and has just launched an iPhone app in Turkish. 90 percent of customers are from his native country, and that market is their focus for now.

Like me, you may be skeptical about the fortune-telling business, or even the ethics of it.

But it makes a lot of business sense. Psychic reading is a money-spinning endeavor. A study suggests that one in seven Americans have consulted a psychic. In Asian countries like Japan and Taiwan, fortune-telling is huge too. That goes without saying: The Chinese are a superstitious lot.

“We grew organically. That’s the key in any startup.”

While the most rational among us might question the legitimacy of these oracles, Sertac claims he is a true believer.

“There are some people with the sixth sense,” he says, and his mum is one of them. He recounts an incident where she did a reading for his CTO Kaya and friends. Kaya is a non-believer.

Upon receiving the voice recording in America, he pressed the play button on his iPhone while he and his friends are having dinner together. His wife was serving soup.

Sertac’s mum says: “I can smell the soup, next time please put it for me also.” The recording was made beforehand.

While fortune-tellers tout their ability to predict the future, Sertac says they serve a more practical purpose too.

“In Turkey, coffee cup reading is a way of communicating problems.”

When customers share their problems with a fortune teller, they forge a bond. Clairvoyants themselves may have psychological or social problems which can be cured when they know about other people’s issues. Customers benefit too, as talking about a problem to a listening ear can be therapeutic.

“Fortune tellers have an effect for us. They don’t make things happen, but these people have a tendency to see something that you and I don’t,” he says, “we also believe in general you can really predict the future by changing yourself.”

Regardless of whether you believe in the practice or not, Aunty Binnaz’s growth is not the result of some hocus-pocus. Attribute it to sound business principles.

Sertac initially started the site as a way to keep his mum occupied. Costs were minimal, and the only marketing expense was a one-dollar daily Facebook ad. But the demand kept up, and they soon had to hire more and more psychics.

“We grew organically. That’s the key in any startup. A startup is not something you invest a lot of cash, bring all those people together, and say: Let’s go. You need a unique idea, good execution, and organic growth to a certain stage where a company can stand on its two feet without too much intervention.”

Quality control is paramount at Aunty Binnaz. They have a stringent selection process, based on a secret formula, like KFC’s secret herbs and spices. Also, psychic readers are cut if they don’t hit a benchmark of 90 percent. They are scored by customers.

Fortune-tellers are given a set of guidelines to adhere to. They cover the use of language, tone, and the introduction, body, and conclusion of their readings. While everything is customized for the customer, the product contains the essence of the company’s values.

They don’t shy away from saying negative things too, although they present it in the most acceptable way possible.

“We don’t say, ‘you’re going to die tomorrow, but something like, ‘please be careful’.”

Aunty Binnaz isn’t just about revenue, but also social impact. Many of the fortune-tellers are hired from outside the existing job market, who may not be working for personal or circumstantial reasons.

Sertac treats all his staff like family, sending personal letters addressing them as such and keeping up to date with their lives. He has a bonus scheme for fortune tellers that stay long-term. Overall, he claims that his staff can earn up to double a normal government-related job, and it comes with flexible hours and the ability to work from home too.

“Starting a business is a childhood dream of mine. I believe that sometimes, you don’t push things, they catch you if you have a open heart.”

As a result, he has been able to keep turnover rates low.

“We want to create a bigger impact in Turkey; not just earn 100 million dollars in revenue. The social impact is what makes me proud and go to bed satisfied.”

What’s interesting about the business is the diversity of fortune tellers on the site. They include an ex-banker who just quit corporate life, a social study expert, a psychologist, an artist, and even an engineer. Some do it full-time, others part-time as a hobby.

The people who seek their services are diverse too, ranging from high-level corporate executives to housewives. A loyal customer even gets multiple readings a day from different fortune tellers, just so she could cross-check their prognosis.

While Turkey is its key market, Aunty Binnaz is keeping an eye on the world. The fact that Sertac operates from Singapore reflects the company’s outlook, although good infrastructure and transparent business and taxation rules factor in as well.

The Asian market is particularly enticing, since forms of fortune-telling like palmistry, astrology, and Feng Shui have continued to flourish. The company could potentially create localized sites with local ‘aunties’ for each market, and is open to engaging strategic partners, investors, and even franchisees to take the business further.

But in the near-term, he plans to expand the pie in Turkey first. He’s also quitting his job as a business consultant to work on his startup full-time.

“Starting a business is a childhood dream of mine. I believe that sometimes, you don’t push things, they catch you if you have a open heart. This project found me,” he says.

The creators of Insync, an app that offers Dropbox-like functionality to Google Docs users, have responded to the launch of Google Drive.

More than two weeks ago, I wrote that Insync is at risk of becoming redundant, since Google Drive replicates some of its features. Although Insync is the superior app for now, it’s only a matter of time before Google starts adding more features to its new offering.

In response, Insync announced two days ago that it will focus on Google Docs power and business users. Also, once it moves out of beta and into version 1.0, Insync will become a paid app with a free 30-day trial. Users will still be able to use Insync for Mac and Windows for free via a referral program. More details will be announced soon.

Currently, there are several things that Insync can do that Google Drive can’t. As listed on their blog post, they are:

• Google Docs in your “drive” — offline GDocs editing
• @gmail.com, @company.com, @family.com — multiple Google account sync support
• Who edited word.doc? — recent changes
• Change your Google Drive directory easily — just click Insync Preferences
• When recipient deletes a file, owner would still have local access to the document
• Local folder and file right-click (contextual menu) support for easy sharing
• No browser required when sharing (standalone app for Insync version 1.0+)

Moving forward, Insync already have their iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone apps in the works, which are expected to launch in May and June. Insync for the iPad and Android tablets will follow.

The mobile versions will have power features like ”send as attachment”, streaming music and videos, offline folders and files, export to SD Card for Android and BlackBerry, saving email attachments to Google Docs, and more.

Version 1.0 of Insync for Mac and Windows will roll out in June or July. Beta versions are already available on these platforms. A Linux version is being planned too.

It’ll be interesting to see how Insync navigates an increasingly crowded file-sharing space. Even Facebook has gotten into the game, enabling users to share files within Facebook Groups.

The company had previously raised a US$800,000 seed round late last year from Neoteny Labs, Reid Hoffman, Skype co-founder Toivo Annus, and Twitter’s ex-COO Santosh Jayaram.