Sprooki, a location-based marketing platform for retailers and shopping malls, has announced today that it will be expanding to Australia. Andrew Lockwood, founder of PostClick, has been appointed the startup’s representative partner in the country.
Since launching in Singapore last year, Sprooki has road tested its app with over 80 retail brands and malls. It also signed its first customer — Singapore shopping mall 313@Somerset — and sealed a deal with startup YFind to integrate indoor positioning services into Sprooki. Read more
Singapore-based early stage fund TNF Ventures has invested SGD 588K (USD 475K) in MoGi, a mobile wallet app developed by Mobile Media Creations. The Singapore government’s National Research Foundation is a co-investor through the Technology Incubation Scheme.
Available on iPhone and Android for free, MoGi enables users to store virtual pre-paid cards, rewards programs, and discount coupons to over 220 dining, health, retail, and beauty outlets in Singapore. Users can even send gifts to one another. It was launched in October 2012. Read more
Touchten, a top mobile games developer from Indonesia, has announced that its latest free-to-download title, Train Legend, has reach the top 5 position overall in the United States iOS App Store. It has logged over 200,000 downloads within 24 hours.
Created by a lean 15-person team, Train Legend, which is also available on Android, is a puzzler that tasks players with connecting color-matched railroads in order to create a path for trains. Reviewers, which gave it an average of 3 out of 5 stars, have noted its similarities to Flow Free, an earlier game where players join pipes to let water through. Read more
When we first covered Applorer in March 2012, the app was just beginning to show some traction. Now, it turns out that the concept has bite in the consumer market, hitting 100,000 downloads within a year.
Available on Google Play, Applorer is a game discovery service that ranks titles based on actual gameplay statistics and personal preferences. While it has become easier to make mobile games, discovery mechanisms have not kept pace. It is still exceedingly hard for promising apps to find traction. Read more
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 Zap wants to change the Philippines' retail landscape using NFC tags. |
The Philippines is ripe for disruption. With its economy soaring, consumer spend rising, and investment money flowing in, the nation’s tech startups are put in position to shape a new normal across industries and sectors.
Leading the charge is a posse of young entrepreneurs, defined not just by geography, but by the fact that they’ve received a lease of life from Kickstart Ventures, a PHP100M (USD2.45M) early stage fund that began setting its wheels in motion last year.
With 10 investments so far, Kickstart has become one of the most important catalysts for the country’s startup aspirations.
One of its investees is Zap, a company that, while shy to reveal its exact investment sum, gladly laid out its plans to transform how retail rewards is done in the Philippines.
Founded by Dustin Cheng, Justin Lim, Terence Lok and Angelique Uy, Zap is a marketing platform that connects retail businesses to consumers through web and mobile technology. It benefits businesses by making marketing as painless and targeted as possible, while at the same time giving them tools to gauge their marketing spend and track customer data. Read more
Talent acquisition platform Next-5 has revealed this week that it has raised USD 500K in funding from early stage investment firm TNF Ventures. The investment was made under the Technology Incubation Scheme, the Singapore government’s co-funding initiative run by the National Research Foundation.
Next-5, a product by Singapore startup Quantine, is a web platform where employers can post vacancies and screen candidates by watching video job applications posted by prospective employees.
The platform is more than just a jobs portal. Once employers shortlist their candidates based on the video introduction, they can conduct a pre-recorded virtual interview where jobseekers have only one chance to answer. This serves as an additional filtering layer. Read more
Singapore-based startup Burpple has made the news again, this time for launching its Android app. It’s off to a fast start, receiving 25 ratings in less than a day for an average of 4 stars.
The food journaling startup — pretty much the media darling of Singapore’s tech scene — has received widespread news coverage ever since its unveiling.
But while the Android app launch was interesting from a consumer’s perspective, it wasn’t the only significant development. Of all the coverage so far, the article that was closest to getting the full picture was penned by Aulia Masna of Indonesia’s DailySocial, who emphasized the fact that Burpple has doubled its user growth in two months.
The startup did mention in its media announcement that it has accumulated 300k ‘food moments’ — or journal entries — and is seeing usage in 140 countries. These figures are up from November 2012, where the app received 150k food moments in 115 countries. Read more
The Blackberry z10. Photo: Enrique Dans
The BlackBerry 10 was recently launched with over 70,000 apps in the BlackBerry World storefront, a number that BlackBerry is claiming means BlackBerry 10 has more apps than any other smartphone platform on its debut.
Whenever a new platform has been launched, developers and companies have to make a decision about whether to develop for the platform.
Three key questions need to be answered:
1. Is the BlackBerry 10 platform (and the phones running it) going to gain significant market share?
2. What is the cost for developing for the BlackBerry 10 platform?
3. Are folks going to download or even pay for my app? Read more
Touchten, one of Indonesia’s top mobile game developers, has been very busy in China lately. In January, it launched Sky Beauty — a localized spin-off of its popular Infinate Sky game — and apparently has been doing rather well.
The company announced today that within one week, Sky Beauty, a first-person aircraft shooter, has achieved 100,000 downloads and about 10,000 daily active users on China’s iOS App Store. Sky Beauty was localized in partnership with Yodo1, an apps publishing platform that provides a set of tools to help apps succeed in the country.
China is an interesting market for Touchten. It claims to have a ‘secure foothold’ in the United States, with the country making up the largest segment of its user base. So it makes sense for the company to target China’s rapidly growing Middle Class population, which accounts for the most number of iOS and Android activations in the world (even larger than the US). Read more
Philippine startup Tripid.ph has announced today that it has received USD 50K in investment from Kickstart Ventures, a seed stage fund that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Globe Telecom.
Tripid.ph is a peer-to-peer carpooling website — users can post rides or join one on its website by searching for their current location and destinations they’re interested in. They can also ‘follow’ routes and be notified when a ride becomes available. The service promises that its trips are cheaper than taking a cab in Metro Manila.
Minette Navarrete, president of Kickstart Ventures, told the Bobbery that it invested in Tripid because of its bold ideas, great team, and solid execution. Read more
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