Southeast Asia finally awakens but mobile Internet speeds still lag

Not too long ago, a little app called WeChat started knocking on doors in Southeast Asia, making itself a permanent fixture in the home screens of smartphone users in the region. Today. WeChat has 200,000 to 300,000 downloads in Thailand, and the app has begun advertising heavily on Facebook, targeting countries in Southeast Asia.

The instant messaging app isn’t developed by some shaggy-haired, irreverent entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, but a powerful Internet giant from China called Tencent.

(Read: Three mobile messaging apps from Asia you must know about)

Global technology firms now realize that Southeast Asia is a sleeping giant that is about to awaken. The number of people in the weirdly-shaped island and archipelagos number about a tenth of the world’s population, making it a collection of huge but diverse markets.

This imminent unleashing of the region’s true potential is the key message of MobileMonday‘s Mobile Southeast Asia Report 2012. The study, available online for free, summarizes some key trends happening in the so-named group of countries.

Here is a snapshot of what the report talks about: Read more

Mobile messaging apps from Asia you must know about: KakaoTalk, WeChat, Cubie

Updated: 8 October 2012

Among the pack of instant messaging apps in the market, Whatsapp is probably the alpha wolf, with a user base that’s estimated to be in the tens of millions. It also announced that it was sending one billion messages in a single day in end October last year.

But all top dogs will be dethroned or removed, and in a wide open market, the challenger can come from anywhere. Asia is one of those places.

Here, we feature three of the apps arising out of the continent that have proven user traction, and have a shot at being numero uno. For all we know, they might already be on top. Read more

China Digest: CIC acquired, Yunyun by ex-Googlers, and more

(1) Kantar Media acquires leading Chinese social business intelligence agency CIC.

(2) Yunyun’s social search merges websites, question-and-answer (Q&A), and Weibo (microblog) results. It is a Chinese social search startup by a team of ex-Googlers.

(3) Sina has been failing to find a sustainable business model (enterprise Weibo, gaming, etc.), none of which have been proven to work. The company should get back to basics: advertising.

(4) One thing Sina Weibo will definitely not do is challenge Tencent’s dominance. Social games, like so much else on the Chinese Internet, belong to Tencent.

(5) Weixin by Tencent will turn into a universally accessible messenger, similar to another famous Chinese product: QQ instant messenger, also by Tencent. So why would one company push two products with such overlapping functionality?

(5) Erin Holaday Ziegler of the public relations department at the University of Kentucky (UK) shared about how they approached using Chinese social media channels like Sina Weibo and Renren.

We thank nordicfactory for the flag image.

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