Facebook has launched a feature that allows users to get special deals from merchants within the social network.

The deals will appear on their news feeds, and after claiming a deal, an email will be sent to the user. The deal can then be redeemed by flashing the email at a store.

Facebook Offers is currently in beta and is being rolled out to selected businesses in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, US, and Turkey, according to The Verge.

All business will eventually be able to create their own deals by clicking the ‘offer’ button at the top of their Facebook Page Timeline.

Barring a backlash from users, Facebook Offers will give group buying sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Deal.com.sg  a run for their money by replacing them as the middlemen between merchants and consumers, and an improved one.

For consumers, redeeming a deal on Facebook will be more convenient at times, since they won’t need to leave the social network. For merchants, it has a greater potential for virality, since sharing about the deal is easier.

Not only that, while merchants often have to split revenues with daily deal sites they engage with, Facebook Offers is slated to be completely free. That alone is a huge competitive advantage.

What remains to be determined is how much business Facebook can snatch from the incumbents.

For now, daily deal sites have an advantage on the mobile arena for the near term. That’s because using a daily deal app to hunt for special offers is an infinitely better experience than redeeming them through Facebook’s bloated mobile app.

Granted, conversion rates for deals on Facebook Offers could be much lower than those hosted on daily deal sites, since users won’t be actively seeking a discount when checking their friend’s updates.

But that may not matter to the merchant since no costs are involved in putting up a deal. They just have to make sure their ads don’t irritate the user too much.

Facebook has over 850 million users worldwide. Out of that, a total of 194 million users are from Asia at the end of March 2012. Most of these users from the Southeast Asia region – 97 million or 54% of the total Facebook users in Asia. Some other observations on the latest Facebook in Asia statistics:

1. In early February 2012, India surpassed Indonesia to become Facebook No. 1 Nation in Asia. Back in January 2011, India has 16.9 million Facebook users. Now, the country has over 45.9 million Facebook users.
2. In addition to India, Japan has been growing impressively in the past 1 year or so. Japan started the year 2011 with 1.8 million Facebook users. Today, there are over 8 million users in Japan.
3. South Korea has been growing with double digits figure. The country is now ahead of Pakistan in the Facebook in Asia list.
4. Among the top ten countries, India, Japan, and South Korea has been the high-growth Facebook nations since early 2011. Throughout 2012, Facebook will be focusing on these three countries for users acquisition, as the Big Blue of the social web aims to reach the 1 billion users mark.
5. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Laos also posted double-digit growth in Quarter 1 of 2012.
6. Growth in countries like Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan are growing at slower pace, likely due to saturation effect. For example, Facebook penetration in Malaysia is over 70%.
7. Between January and March this year, the total Facebook Asian users grew by 7%. However, the quarter-to-quarter growth rate has been on a downward trend since Quarter 1 of 2011. Facebook is expected to grow with single digit figure throughout 2012.
8. Total Facebook users in Asia will sail pass 200 million in Quarter 2 this year.

Images: Grey Review

About the author

Yung Hui Lim is the founder of the Grey Review, a blog focusing on tech startups, web application reviews, and social media in Asia and product manager at MOL, one of Southeast Asia’s largest Internet companies.

Some examples have included Zappos-clone Zalora and Amazon-clone Lazada.

Swedish startup Wrapp, which specializing in doing social gift exchanging, has also been Samwer-ed, and the result is called DropGifts.

But, instead of taking it lying down, Wrapp has launched into a high-stakes game of global expansion. In other words, they hope to beat Rocket Internet at their own game: Rapid execution.

Wrapp recently announced that they’ve opened in Taiwan. Bruce Chen, the company’s country manager, told ArcticStartup: “Taiwan is Wrapp’s beachhead for introducing our unique social gifting service to Asian markets where gift giving is culturally an everyday event.”

Digging at Rocket Internet, he adds: “Since we don’t own ecommerce businesses – and promise to never start one – we can assure Asian retailers a conflict-free, long lasting relationship built on innovation and real value creation.”

Japan appears to be next on their wishlist: Carl Fritjofsson, COO of Wrapp, was seen doing business there.

Ever since DropGifts announced their presence to the world, Wrapp has sped up their expansion plans. They are now in parts of Europe, and are aiming to move into the US, China, Japan, and Brazil.

DropGifts has already established a presence in several countries, having launched in Italy, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, France and Brazil. Their next destinations are India and South Africa.

A GiGaOm writer has observed that Rocket Internet has of late escalated their cloning aggressiveness. Instead of just targeting successful Silicon Valley startups, they are now copying nascent but promising companies too — Wrapp being one of them.

Seven years ago, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the Partnership for New York City started asking what New York had to do to remain competitive on the world stage. That resulted in the Cities of Opportunity report. This year just saw the release of the 4th edition. This time around, they ranked 26 cities around the world, with a third of them located in the Asia-Pacific region. Curious as to whether your city is one of the chosen ones? Below is a run down of the Asia-Pacific cities that made it into the list.

26. Mumbai (India)

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Mumbai (or formerly known as Bombay), is the most populous city in India and fifth most populous city in the world. It is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra.

Strength
Even though it is the lowest ranked city in the report, Mumbai has a few strengths: It ranks number one for sustainability (a third of India electricity consumption is provided by renewable energy). Their few other strengths are: recycled waste, city carbon footprint, attracting FDI (Foreign Direct Investment), and their skyscraper construction activity.

Weakness
You will expect they have a longer list of weaknesses because Mumbai ranks last out of all the cities evaluated. They are almost the bottom for everything: Cost (last), technology readiness (2nd last), intellectual capital and innovation (2nd last), health, safety, and security (3rd last), ease of doing business (3rd last), demographic and livability (3rd last), lifestyle asset (3rd last).

19. Shanghai (China)

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Shanghai is the most populous city in China and is one of the world’s major financial centres. It aims to be a global finance hub and international shipping centre.

Strength
Competing nationwide, Shanghai has similar strengths with Beijing: Transportation and Infrastructure with Shanghai’s mass transit coverage, miles of mass transit track, traffic congestion, and skyscraper construction activity overcoming Beijing’s. But overall, Shanghai loses to Beijing at 3 ranks below the latter.

Weakness
Generally, Beijing and Shanghai share similar major problems, but Shanghai has another significant major downside: Demographics and Livability, with Shanghai ranking in the bottom two after Moscow. This indicator defines the Shanghai population’s happiness state, whether people are satisfied and productive and whether their businesses are busy and making money. Basically, the study shows that Shanghai has a low happiness state because of their low working age population and a low rank for thermal comfort.

17. Beijing (China)

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Have you heard of Peking? Yup, Peking is another name of Beijing. Beijing is a metropolis in Northern China and the capital of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) where it is recognized as the political, educational and cultural centre of PRC.

Strength
Beijing has different kind of strength than Hong Kong. Its Transportation and Infrastructure is top-notch with accessibility from airport to CBD areas ranking number one while the cost of public transport in Beijing is considered the second most affordable, where it ranks 2nd among 26 countries. Furthermore, their incoming/outgoing passenger flow is ranked 6th and their aircrafts movement is positioned 7th among 26 countries.

Weakness
Beijing ranks 7th last for Health, Safety and Security issues. This indicator has five sub-categories. Among them, Beijing ranks 3rd last for their political environment and 5th from bottom for their end-of-life care (reported on China Daily). As for the Cost indicator, Beijing has a serious problem in purchasing power where they rank 3rd last, after Mumbai and Mexico City. Within the Cost indicator, they rank 5th last for total tax rate, 6th from bottom for cost of living and 7th last  for business trip index where stability, healthcare, culture and environment, infrastructure, and cost factor in.

16. Seoul (South Korea)

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Seoul, capital and largest city of South Korea, is also one of the largest cities in the world. It is economic, political and cultural centre of the country.

Strength
Seoul is strong in Transposrtation and Infrastructure where cost of public transport and airport to CBD access are their forte. It means if you are a foreigner on a short business trip in Seoul, you do not need to worry about the transport from International Airport to your client’s office at the CBD area, because you can simply use the public transport due to its improved accessibility. Both of them are positioned 5th among the other 26 countries.

Weakness
Although Seoul has an affordable public transport, their living cost is still relatively high. It can be seen from their purchasing power. The Seoul population in general has a relatively low purchasing power compared to other countries on the list. Seoul is positioned 10th last in purchasing power. It means their hourly payment rate per commodity price and rental rate ratio is low, thus Seoul needs to either increase their hourly payment rate or decrease their commodity price and rental rate. Seoul also fares quite badly in lifestyle asset and sustainability. Seoul ranks 5th last for lifestyle assets, with major problems for sports and leisure activities,  as well as green space as a percent of city area and hotel rooms. While for sustainability, Seoul or to be precise South Korea as a country have not consumed much renewable energy yet until date.

14. Tokyo (Japan)

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Tokyo, the capital of Japan, is the seat of the Japanese government and the imperial palace, and the home of royal family. It ranks number fourteen among 26 cities, number four in the Asia Pacific region, and third in Asia.

Strength
As a high-class metropolitan city in East Asia region, Tokyo has a competitive advantage over other countries in Transportation and Infrastructure. Within Asia Pacific region itself, Tokyo is positioned 1st for their Transportation and Infrastructure. Among nine criteria from the score board, three stood out: Aircraft movements, Incoming/Outgoing Passengers Flow, and Skycraper construction activity. This time around, Tokyo joins London, New York, Paris and Chicago in the top five for incoming/outgoing passengers flow.

Weakness
It is no secret that Tokyo has a high cost of living and according to the PcW report, Tokyo is 1st among the listed countries in living cost, means it has the highest living cost across the 26 countries. Furthermore, the cost for a business to find real estate in Tokyo is relatively high as well, it ranks 3rd. Despite their cost, Tokyo also has problems with sustainability. It is ranked 5th last for renewable energy consumption and 6th from bottom for recycled waste.

10. Hong Kong (China)

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Hong Kong, one of two special administrative regions (SARs) of China, beats two other cities from PRC: Beijing and Shanghai.

Strength
Hong Kong shares the same strengths as Singapore: Ease of Doing Business, where ease of hiring and flexibility of visa travel are the highest among others and both cities share the same scores. For Hong Kong, the Labour Department provides free recruitment assistance to employers and placement service to job-seekers through a Job Vacancy Processing Centre, a Telephone Employment Service Centre and 11 Job Centres (including two employment and guidance centres for new arrivals) distributed all over the territory, while visa travel in Hong Kong is governed here. We can see that Hong Kong loses to Singapore in ease of entry, where on the previous assessment Hong Kong was placed 1st. Their flexibility of visa travel is also up to 1st place from 3rd the last time.

Weakness
Hong Kong follows Singapore as well in term of its weakness: Sustainability. Although Hong Kong ranks three rungs up in renewable energy consumption, the city has worse air pollution than Singapore.

9. Singapore (Singapore)

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Singapore city is Singapore country. Singapore is only a dot if you look at the Asia Pacific map. But regardless of its small area as a city, Singapore is positioned first within the Asia region in the report, meaning Singapore gives the most opportunities among Asia countries in this Cities of Opportunity leaderboard.

Strength
Singapore has the highest point for Ease of Doing Business, according to the report. Drilling down to the sub-categories, it tops the field for ease of hiring, ranks 2nd for ease of starting a business, 6th for rigidity of hours, and 5th for ease of firing.  But due to the recent election result in Singapore, will some policies within the countries change and affect the ease of doing business in the country? Will it be driven towards or away from supportive regulations to nurture on-going or start-up businesses? We’ll soon find out.

Weakness
Singapore has the lowest point for Sustainability. Among the sub-categories in this indicator, Singapore has the worst score for renewable energy consumption. But in terms of air pollution, due to Singapore’s policy about air pollution especially with regards to motor vehicles, they are considered cleanest among 26 countries.

5. Sydney (Australia)

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Sydney is located in New South Wales, Australia. As the largest and most populous city in Australia, Sydney is the number one city among the graded cities in Asia Pacific region.

Strength
Sydney attained the most number of points in the Intellectual Capital and Innovation category. They are strongest in Libraries with public access, followed by percentage of population with higher education and intellectual property protection. Extrapolating from here, we can say that Sydney has a supportive environment for a new startup or ongoing business.

Weakness
Sydney has the lowest point for technology readiness, where software and multimedia design development and design is their weakest link. This would be a major critical loss if Sydney does not have any significant improvements in the future. But outside of Sydney, it might be seen as an opportunity to penetrate the market.

Do you agree or disagree with the rankings? Do share your thoughts!

Special Interview on Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystem with Brad Feld from onsuccess on Vimeo.

For full transcript, click here.

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This has been brought to you by SGE and Onsuccess. Onsuccess is a media enterprise for start-ups and ventures in Korea. Onsuccess introduces innovative Korean start-ups and ventures to people overseas through media partners and inspires readers by sharing interesting business ideas and trends from all over the world. Furthermore, Onsuccess holds various events, offering actual chances for Korean start-ups and ventures to meet other start-ups, venture business partners and investors abroad. They publish in both Korean and English.

According to ZDNet Asia’s interview with Arvind, about 18% of the 100 million LinkedIn members worldwide are located in Asia and has been growing rapidly – “about 130 percent over the last year between March 2010 and March 2011″.

1. Brand extension and customer engagement
2. Business models and partnerships
3. Apps and social media and social gaming
4. Creating beautiful apps
5. Multi-platform apps

1. Head of Developer Relations
2. Head of Strategy
3. Head of Marketing
4. Head of App Development
5. Head of Business Development/Sales
6. Head of Product Development
7. Head of Consumer Marketing
8. Head of Mobile
9. Head of Digital/New media

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Software/Cloud Computing

OrangeScape (India)

OrangeScape is a pioneer platform company one of the leaders in the Cloud Application Platform (PaaS – Platform-as-a-Service) space. OrangeScape is one of the Global 10 companies featured in Gartner`s PaaS Competitive Landscape report and proud to be the only company outside of USA in that report. OrangeScape is also featured in all of the PaaS reports from Forrester. Profile on TiE.

Internet/Social Networking

It seems like there is no winner from Asia Pacific for this category…

Mobile/Wireless

Luna Ergonomics Pvt Ltd (India)

Luna Ergonomics is a technology R&D start up in India who are the inventors of a new technology that offers people to type in all languages of India and the world on the existing basic phone, without a printed keypad and yet offers unprecedented speed, ease and comfort to type. Using this new technology, one can demonstrably type in Hindi or Arabic on the phone faster than one can type in English on an equivalent phone today. The technology is already developed and running on the phone for 22 major languages of the world of every linguistic family. Profile on TiE.

Cinemacraft Pvt Ltd (Japan)

Cinemacraft is building an Interactive mobile broadcast platform for rich media distribution. The server side is cloud based. Our patent pending encoder/decoder compression and format (Prime Streaming Format) technologies combined with our HTML compliant player provides a single solution that can be used to stream video, images, and audio to any mobile device on any network. Through this, consumers can experience live and on-demand mobile video, animation, stereo music, interactive social media and interactive games. Profile on TiE.

Energy/Clean Tech

LanzaTech (New Zealand)

LanzaTech was founded in early 2005 to develop and commercialize proprietary technologies for the production of lowest cost fuel ethanol from gases produced by the steel industry. LanzaTech has expanded the focus of its process development program to include other industrial off gases and synthesis gas from gasification. LanzaTech is now able to offer an integrative waste gas to fuels and chemicals technology having successfully demonstrated the production of platform chemicals through its process. Today the company employs a strong technical team of 60 staff internationally, has a rapidly growing patent portfolio and is making rapid progress taking its process from pilot to commercial scale. Profile on TiE.

Life Sciences

It seems like there is no winner from Asia Pacific for this category…

Congrats to all the winners! You can check out the Singapore chapter of TiE here.

Identifii
Identifii aims to make career discovery simpler for young professionals by helping to solve the problems they face when selecting their career. The company seeks to educate their users about their personality preferences in order to help them make better career decisions. On the employee side, Identifii enables employees to target applicants whose personality characteristics and aptitude suits the company requirements.

PlayMoolah
PlayMoolah is the brainchild of Min Xuan, Audrey and Alam. The company provides a fun online platform for kids, aged 5 to 11, to save, manage, and earn an allowance. PlayMoolah leverages on game mechanics for behavior change, empowering children with the curiosity, knowledge, skills and tools needed for financial capability. Meanwhile, parents are equipped with a separate platform to monitor, reward, and engage with their child’s progress. (PlayMoolah just exhibited at SXSW in the US.)

Fetch Plus Asia Pacific
Fetch Plus’ product, FetchFans, is an interactive custom brand design engine built for commercial use that designs templates for Facebook, Twitter and blogs through a three-step process. This allows companies to update their pages with messages, new offers and promotions quickly in order to always be in contact with their customer base.

LoveByte
They always say “The more, the merrier”. LoveByte looks to bring this to blogging, from the bloggers point. Instead of a lone blogger, think blogging as a couple activity. LoveByte is a couple blogging application that aims to inject an element of romance into the activity. The application incentivize couples to contribute actively towards perserving their special moments together through fun challenges and rewards.

Not a Basement Studio
Not a Basement Studio is made out of a team of five Vietnamese students in the Singapore Management University who are captivated with developing apps for the iPhone and iPad. Their product, Wikly! Glance, aims to replace all your boring, native calendar apps with something beautiful and intuitive. Wikly! Glance provides users with the ability to customize their calendars with many of the apps beautifully designed themes. Not only look forward to an exciting week ahead, enjoy jotting down those activities too!

Fezzl
With the Groupon clone wars still raging, Fezzl might have found a niche with its product, Zuupy CrowdDeals. This daily deal site aims to help business go viral with their deals by using the Facebook “Like” button as a way users claim deals. Deals are not activated until a minimum number of “Likes” are clicked. For non-Facebook users out there, clicking the “Like” button posts an update the user’s own wall, exposing the deal to all their friends.

Taxizu
Care to share a taxi with a random stranger travelling a similar route in order to reduce cost? Think peak-hour surcharges and I bet your wallets are begging for this. Taxizu is a Hong Kong-based startup that with an application that allows taxi sharing and social organization. The application allows user to collaborate and self-organize to share taxis on long-haul taxi routes. Users get to publish their preferred travelling details prior to departure in order to find share-mates and can also socially rank their ride share peers.

Twidl Inc.
Twidl Inc. is a Philippines based company that is building a social network around picture journals called PicLyf (pronounced pik-layf). The company’s product is going up against other photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Instagram but is confident that their ability to motivate updates (through badges, topics and leaderboards), ease-of-use, focus on static pictures and network-generated audience will appeal to shutterbugs out there.

Spatial Ideas
Spatial Ideas aims to integrate information from online news sites and social media in order to built the ultimate marketing tool, LocoBuzz. This powerful map-based analytics and communications platform allows marketers to identify potential customers, spot trends and evaluate marketing campaigns. The unique selling point of Spatial Ideas over their competitors is their easy-to-use UI, which they believe appeals to users of such services.

Stylelogue
Combining fashion with technology to simplify the search for all the right answers to fashion woes is what Stylelogue aims to do. The mobile and web application allows style-savvy users to communicate, share and receive information on all the latest hots and nots of the fashion industry. By focusing on the local market and publishing real styles by real people, Stylelogue looks to appeal to their target market based on relevance and convenience.

Feed George
Feed George aims to aggregate geodata on a single platform providing user with the ease to search data via data categories and feed source through georss. With Feed George, bloggers who wish to add geographical information to their posts are able to do so too.

FLOChip Sdn. Bhd.
FLOChip’s product, 31Storey, seeks to bring in a bigger social element into online shopping by marrying Facebook with eBay. Shoppers can share their fashion tips or lookbooks with their friends while following their favorite participating boutiques. For online shop owners, 31Storey provides a single platform to market, sell, receive payments and monitor sales data easily. Co-founder Ong Teng Siong is a YCombinator alum who sold a company to Loopt.

WorkCrowd by AdExcel Online Networks Sdn. Bhd.
WorkCrowd aims to help build and strengthen bonds among co-workers by being a social platform for the workplace. WorkCrowd seeks to incentivize the initiatives of co-workers in getting to know each other through unlocking badges. The platform can also assist the transition of new workers into the workplace by helping them familiarize themselves with the culture and facilitate knowledge transfer.

FanXT
FanXT is a privately funded website that seeks to be the worldwide leader in fantasy sports. Seeking to expand the fantasy sport offering beyond only that of popular U.S. sports, the website offers a one-stop fantasy platform that works on the web, Facebook, iOS devices, Android, Blackberry, Yahoo! TV and Google TV.

CellKast Games Pte. Ltd.
CellKast Games uses mystery deals that combines proven social game elements and discount offers to drive product discovery through their product Tikam. The concept behind the mystery deals idea is that the company believes that too many options creaties confusion among customer which makes them unhappy. By randomizing what deals customers receive, it lowers expectations while increasing satisfaction. Got a deal that doesn’t suit you? Give it to a friend as a gift!

Posttude
Posttude aims to provide an address for every one by being the new postal code system for the whole world. The service uses the geotude algorithm to assign a 13-number geotude to users which acts like an IP for the location.

MobileApps.com Pte. Ltd.
With the applications industry heating up and drawing a lot of attention from app developers, MobileApps.com seeks to standout from other app stores by allowing developers to retain 95% cut from sales while making it easy for developers to syndicate advertisements of their apps to target end-consumers. By being a global cross-platform app marketplace, MobileApps.com seeks to cut through the hassle and problems of buying apps through other App Stores that may have payment restrictions.

Soft Solvers Solutions Sdn. Bhd.
Aiming to help Asian businesses tackle customer relationship issues, Soft Solvers Solutions’ Second CRM offers on-demand solutions to small companies which covers business operations like sales, marketing, customer support and project management. Small companies can choose to automate their businesses with the simple and cost-effective solutions offered by Second CRM.

Alphapod
Always tweeting about your meals before you devour it? Why not turn this information to help a lost, hungry, soul through Alphapod’s product, WootFood. WootFood aims to be the best way to find good food around you. By displaying highest rated food that is sorted by distance from the user, the service helps foodies discover new and amazing food offerings in the vicinity.

Motif Channel
Motif Channel’s product name explains it all, if you understand Cantonese. Fongfeikei.com gives event tickets a second chance if their buyers are not able to make the event. Ticket-holders can post their unused tickets on the website while potential buyers can place their request for even tickets that they missed out on. A matching algorithm will then notify both parties when a match is found. Not sure where available tickets are? Fret not. Fongfeikei.com’s future offerings includes a geolocation feature that allows users to see the location of available tickets and the event.