While traditional media in the United States have been reeling from the digital media revolution, registering millions in losses, shutdowns, and layoffs, their counterparts in Southeast Asia have been insulated from its devastating effects.
But maybe not for long.
Well aware that the window to adapt is fast closing, the region’s big media are finally getting more serious about investing in technology. Take this recent piece of news as an example: Scoop, a popular digital newsstand in Indonesia, has raised SGD 3M (USD 2.4M) in Series B funding from Kompas Gramedia, the country’s largest media conglomerate.
It’s certainly a good result for Scoop, which previously raised SGD 1M in Series A funding, hinting at a substantial increase in valuation for the company. The service currently has 210k monthly active users, with 90 percent coming from Indonesia.
Willson Cuaca, CEO of Apps Foundry, the company behind Scoop, says that this is the first non-controlling minority stake the media giant has taken in a foreign entity (App Foundry is based in Singapore). Prior to this, Kompas has either been developing its own products or acquiring other companies.
This significant development is no isolated incident. Read more
Empty rooms have always been a problem for hotels, especially during off-peak seasons. Besides the lost revenue opportunities, hotel operators have to contend with fixed costs like staff wages, insurance premiums, and marketing expenses.
One way to solve this problem would be to match unfilled inventory with a market of last minute vacationers. We already know that this market exists. Hotel Tonight, a San Francisco based startup, has developed a hotel booking mobile app catering to spur-of-the-moment travelers. It appears to be doing very well, having raised a USD 23M Series C round in June last year.
Now, Hong Kong startup HotelQuickly has brought a similar concept to Asia. Launched in March this year in Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the iOS and Android app has almost 200 hotels available for booking. It isn’t the only one getting into the act — CheckInTonight is also hoping to attract vacationers to book accommodation on its platform.
There’s no better time to capitalize on an idea like this. While Hotel Tonight is expanding outside of the United States — Europe, and not Asia, appears to be its next destination. This leaves a possibly unmet demand in Asia, as we’re certainly seeing a lot of intra-Asia travel to hotspots like Bali, Phuket, and Singapore.
HotelQuickly fits a classic ploy that has been honed to perfection by opportunistic entrepreneurs: Find an idea that is working well in the West, figure out if it’s viable in Asia, and replicate the idea there. The exit strategy is also clear: Hope that you get acquired by a competitor or a larger travel site.
While it’s challenging to recreate a Facebook or Google in parts of Asia, the hospitality sector, which is riding on Asia’s thriving reputation as a vacationer’s paradise, holds a lot of potential for replicating ideas.
HotelQuickly’s five co-founders know this game very well — two of them were from Rocket Internet after all. Christian Mischler was the former COO of FoodPanda while Raphael Cohen was the managing director of FoodPanda Vietnam.
Tomas Laboutka (CEO), Michal Juhas (CTO) and Mario Peng (CFO) round up the rest of the team, which has so far raised USD 500k from private investors in US, Europe, and Asia. The team can’t reveal names yet as they’re still in the midst of fundraising.
Tomas tells me that the idea to do this startup first emerged in July last year. From then on, the company hired a team of developers that worked remotely from Brazil, Pakistan, and Thailand. While having a team in disparate locations was challenging, the arrangement sped up execution by taking advantage of varying time zones to work around the clock — sort of like passing a baton.
Getting the development process down pat is important for a tech-oriented startup like HotelQuickly. Its mobile backend compares rates and displays the hotel rooms with the best value on the app. Payment on the app has to be as seamless as possible despite the lack of an ubiquitous payment gateway across Asia.
Then there’s the matter of developing a web platform for hoteliers to indicate the rooms they have available and the rates they’re going for. The platform also facilitates real-time or delayed money transfer from the startup to the hotel, with the company collecting a commission before passing on the rest.
With the technology is more or less in place, the startup can start devoting some effort to marketing the app. It has set other parts of Asia in its sights.
News has hit this week that Indonesia has become the new battleground for beauty box companies — a type of subscription service where customers receive a box of cosmetics samples on a monthly basis.
Singapore’s VanityTrove is believed to be the first to enter the country, followed closely behind by Lolabox, started by two former Rocket Internet employees, and BeautyTreats. Both competitors launched officially yesterday to much fanfare from the tech press.
While their entry into Indonesia is good news for consumers who have been clamoring for such services in the country, there are legitimate reasons to be skeptical about their success.
It all starts with the fact that Rocket Internet’s very own GlossyBox has avoided Indonesia and its surrounding countries like a plague. Read more
In rapid fashion, Qoo10 has become a major e-commerce marketplace in Asia, processing SGD 278M (USD 224M) in its five countries last year, up from SGD 150M in 2011. However, it’s still a smidgen of the USD 175B worth of global transactions that are taking place on eBay — roughly equivalent of what China’s Taobao was processing in 2012.
The company makes between three to six percent off every transaction. To fund future expansion, it is gunning for an IPO within two years on the Nasdaq.
Singapore is Qoo10′s second largest market in terms of users and sales performance. The company’s top market is Japan, which has 1.7 million users, or twice that of Singapore. The gap is considerably less in terms of transactions, with Qoo10 processing 35,000 in Japan and 30,000 in Singapore. However, if country size is taken into consideration, then Singapore is the company’s most active market.
Qoo10 is also operating in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
The company behind the marketplace, Giosis, is a joint venture between eBay (49 percent stake) and Ku Young Bae (51 percent). Ku, who also founded GMarket, sold his South Korean operations to eBay before working on Giosis and rebranding all international GMarket sites to Qoo100.
More stats on Qoo10
Traction in Singapore:
|
|
Founding to 31 December 2010
|
2011
|
2012
|
Accumulative
(As of March 2013)
|
|
Sales (SGD)
|
6.4 million
|
34.6 million
|
91million
|
160 million
|
|
Transactions
|
770,000
|
3 million
|
6.5million
|
12 million
|
|
Members
|
88,000
|
270,000
|
430,000
|
900,000
|
|
Sellers
|
5,000
|
10,000
|
30,000
|
53,000
|
Number of employees: 450 (40 in Singapore)
Overall total sales from mobile: 20 percent
Downloads for Qoo10 app in Singapore/World: 500k/1 million
Growth rate in Singapore: 20 percent a month (fastest among all countries)
Registered Singapore users in March 2013: 900,000
New registered users a day since January 2012 in Singapore: 1,000
Profile of Qoo10 user: 27 years old on average, 75 percent female
Pageviews in Singapore: 90 million
Vistaprint, the sixth largest public-listed printing company in the United States, has just gone small by launching a simple-to-use website builder called Vistamobi, which is targeted at micro business owners in developing countries in Southeast Asia.
It’s a novel product, especially because it comes from an unlikely source — a firm more well known in Europe and the US for printing namecards than mobile innovation.
But the powers that be at Vistaprint are embracing entrepreneurship from within. Vistamobi is created by a lean four-man team stationed in Singapore, headed by Maliha Quadir, digital director for global emerging markets. Revenues are not a concern for the team at this point; they are more intent on acquiring users, getting feedback, and iterating.
Vistamobi is unlike Wix, Yola, and Weebly in two important ways.
First, it is built from the ground up to be mobile friendly, an important feature in emerging markets since many people have mobile phones as their first and primary computing device.
An illustration of this can be seen on Vistamobi’s desktop and tablet interface. Whenever an update is made to their website, users will see a preview in a virtual mobile phone screen. In this view, they can pick from a variety of mobile phone makes that are popular in their countries.
Second, Vistamobi websites are optimized for low bandwidth, which again is crucial since Internet connection speeds in these countries leave much to be desired. As such, the websites that can be created are designed to load fast and take care of the basics.
The product is catered to micro business owners and SME bosses who don’t possess HTML knowledge and don’t how to use more advanced CMS systems like WordPress, let alone customize it to their needs. But it does cover the basics: Created websites are responsive, possess analytics, and are SEO-friendly. Some limited customizations are available, although custom URLs aren’t enabled yet.
Some interesting use cases have arisen which step beyond retail and e-commerce businesses. Since soft launching in Indonesia about a month ago, consumers and students have started using Vistamobi to create their own sites. Student boy bands are getting in on the act too, adding links to SoundClould on their websites.
It seems that people still do want their own .com despite the advent of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Vistamobi has so far launched localized sites for India and Indonesia. While it is targeting emerging markets in South Asia, Maliha says that they are also looking at catering to business owners from developed economies, who may desire more bells and whistles.
Despite the availability of so many easy-to-use website builders out there, tech companies still believe there is room in the market for another product.
Infinite.ly from the Philippines, for example, believes it can ride on the wave of new Internet users that are joining the pile in the emerging economies. While it doesn’t have clear differentiation, its founder says that it is just at the beginning of its product roadmap, with vertical-specific features being part of the mix.
Another new website creator to watch out for is Burpple’s Pages — which enables restaurant owners to create their own websites in a snap. What’s special about Pages is that it leverages on Burpple’s mobile social network to promote the restaurant’s food.
It also has F&B specific features like interactive menus as well as online reservation, takeaway, and delivery options.
These companies are responsible for just a slice of the action in the online presence-building space. With the next Billion users slated to come from Asia, it’s no wonder many firms, from startups to MNCs, are hoping to win over business owners in this part of the world.
Rakuten, the e-commerce giant from Japan with a global presence, announced today that it has set up a USD 10M fund in Singapore that will be investing in startups primarily from Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. These are countries that Rakuten is focusing its business activities on.
That said, Shin Hasegawa, director at Rakuten Global Marketing Office, does not exclude the possibility of investing in companies outside of these countries.
Shin talked about the fund during the Startup Asia conference held in Singapore. Read more
Scoop, a top digital newsstand app from Indonesia, is expanding to India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Philippines. It has launched localized iOS apps in those countries, adding titles from publishers India Today Group, SPH Magazines from Singapore, and The Philippine Star Group of Publications. Read more
MOL AccessPortal, a subsidiary of MOL Global, has today announced the acquisition of AyoPay, an Indonesian payment service provider focusing on online game credits. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
The strategic investment will expand MOL’s offerings in Indonesia, allowing partners and customers to achieve the full benefits of both services. Read more
FoodPanda, a Rocket Internet online food delivery company, has launched a new mobile app for iOS and Android.
The app allows users to filter restaurants by location and order food using their mobile phones. They can also see details like minimum order required, delivery fee, and delivery time.
It is available for download in 14 countries: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Senegal and Russia. Read more
Filed under News, ProductsTags: foodpanda, india, Indonesia, Malaysia, Rocket Internet, RocketInternet, Singapore, taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam
Since launching in October last year, mobile loyalty app Pouch has been off to a running start, picking up traction among merchants in Indonesia. It is now looking to expand abroad, with Philippines as its first overseas stop.
The Singapore and Indonesia based startup has revealed that it has a presence in 25 shopping malls in Jakarta, representing over 70 brands. It claims to be the market leader in the country. Agreements are in place with major malls Kuningan City, Bellagio, FX and Central Park, and even a nutrition website to implement loyalty features.
While it isn’t revealing exact consumer-related figures, it will say that it has some tens of thousands of active users every month.
Pouch is available on Android, iOS, and Blackberry and is free for consumers to use. Most of its users would appear to be on the Blackberry platform, since the Android app has less than 5,000 active installs at the moment. Read more
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