News about <![CDATA[Singapore]]> News about en-us <![CDATA[Singapore's SingTel Wants To Pump Another $1.6B Into Startup Investments]]> Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, SingTel, plans to set aside $1.6 billion (S$2 billion) over the next three years for startup acquisitions. Like those it has made in recent years, these are expected to be in the digital media space. All of these can be tracked back to the major restructuring of SingTel’s business arms last year, where it divided itself into three pillars called Consumer, ICT and Digital Life. The first two focus on consumer and enterprise segments, respectively, but the Digital Life arm is most representative of the change. The division was set up as a reaction to over-the-top competition from third party content providers, and SingTel said Digital Life was going to compete head on, providing smart TV, digital magazines and local content. Some of acquisitions so far include restaurant review sites, Hungrygowhere and Eatability, and photo app Pixable. SingTel has also been bullish as a VC. In 2010, it set up a separate venture arm called Innov8 to specifically look at acquisitions that would boost its current play in the telecoms arena. Innov8 was set up with an initial fund size of $160 million (S$200 million), and has since acquired firms like mobile ad company Amobee. Innov8 has also raised rounds in startups like mobile ad exchange Nexage and Chinese game publisher Yodo. SingTel runs telecoms operations in other countries in the region, like Optus in Australia. It has significant stakes in other carriers like Globe in The Philippines (44 percent), Bharti in India (32 percent) and Telkomsel in Indonesia (35 percent). Altogether, its operations in the region cover about 400 million mobile subscribers.]]> <![CDATA[Pixel People Hits $700K In Three Months After Distributing With Chillingo]]> Pixel People, an iOS game, has raked in $700,000 over 2 million downloads in the span of three months, said the game's maker, Lambdamu. The key to their success, according to a company spokesperson, was a distribution deal with Chillingo. ]]> <![CDATA[How the Wisdom of Confucius Can Lead You to Financial Success]]> DailyFinance.com: Getty Images A 2012 Pew Research Center Report, "The Rise of Asian Americans," identified Asian Americans as "the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States." In addition, according to the report, Asian ... Read more]]> <![CDATA[Asian Price Comparison Site Save 22 Gets Angel Round Of “Mid Six Figures”]]> Singaporean price comparison startup Save 22 just got an investment of “mid six figures” in Singapore dollars, according to co-founder, Guyi Shen. S$500,000 translates to about US$400,000, as a reference. The three-year-old startup indexes prices of goods and displays a price comparison. Its mobile app also allows you to scan a barcode of a product with your phone, and it will display a list of stores that list the same item, organized by price. Its database covers about 500,000 products, and the listings come from both retailers and mobile app users who submit product and pricing data. The company says it has staff on the ground actively indexing prices of popular goods, as well. The funding round was led by Crystal Horse Investments, an angel firm in Singapore. Crystal Horse also invested in Singapore-based Dropmyemail and Hong Kong-based Frenzoo. Other participants in the round are Nuffnang from Malaysia, which operates the largest blog advertising network in Southeast Asia, Strategia Adventures and Little Lights Capital, from Indonesia. Chun Dong Chau, an investor with Crystal Horse, said the company was picked because of its engineering team. He claims that Save 22′s data engine on the backend mines data collected from retail partners’ catalogs. Compared with other price comparison websites, which just provide lead generation back to retailers, Save 22 is expected to develop an additional revenue stream from offering some data analytics back to third parties. The investor is pushing Save 22 to continue growing its database within the region, which will improve the quality of its analysis, he said. “Southeast Asia is going in terms of its GDP but also Internet and mobile penetration is growing massively. The market is quite big, and we don’t have plans to go outside yet.” The company competes with other players Asia like PricePinz. The latter has a pretty similar app that also does barcode scanning, but is a younger firm, and just launched its app at the start of this year. At the start of the year, PricePinz said it had just about 4,000 products cataloged. It also said in an interview with e27 that its focus is restricted to electronic goods for now, but plans to expand to other verticals like groceries and apparel within the year. If it’s a scramble to catalog more data, Save 22 is the winner for now in the region, but expansion plans will potentially open it up]]> <![CDATA[Introducing FREE "one-stop shop" online platform for online traders to share & learn trading]]> <![CDATA[Wi-Fi Indoor Positioning Firm YFind Launches Analytics Tool]]> Prepping for its US expansion, Singapore-based indoor positioning technology firm YFind has launched a broader analytics tool so that its customers can slice and dice foot traffic information in malls. The company’s service tracks unique visitors as they move through a mall. It relies on Wi-Fi to do this, so it can track users who have their Wi-Fi turned on on their phones. Because it doesn’t rely on GPS, it can track people indoors, and in dense environments with about 3-meter accuracy, says the company. YFind founder, Melvin Yuan, said the new analytics board, called TheRetailHQ, is hoped to offer shop owners and mall operators a way to figure out where people are going in the space, and correspondingly what promotions can be run where foot traffic is heaviest. And because unique visitors are tracked, some new information can be derived, such as identifying repeat visitors and how long people spend in each store. Some predictive analytics is packed into the new dashboard as well, said Yuan. YFind is gearing up for its US expansion out of Singapore. This year, it will set up offices in New York and Hong Kong, and next year, Sydney and London are planned. Last June, it raised $1.22 million (S$1.5 million) from Innosight Ventures and Walden International. This, in addition to a $609,409 (S$750,000) seed grant from the Singapore government. The new analytics dashboard showing a heat map of foot traffic in a mall]]> <![CDATA[LinkedIn Reaches 1M Users In Singapore, Or 20% Of The Country's Population]]> LinkedIn has acquired one million users in Singapore, or 20 percent of its 5 million population, since the service's launch there in 2011, the professional networking site announced today. This milestone means that about 70 percent of Singapore's labor force and students now have accounts on the Web site, according to the company.]]> <![CDATA[Game Show Warriors Combines Manga Comics And Casual Gaming]]> Inzen Studio, a small game startup in Singapore has just released an ambitious project called Game Show Warriors. The launch kicks off with the release of an iOS game called Amazing Studly Strikes, but the studio has quietly released the first two episodes of a Web comic, and episode three just dropped to accompany the release of the mobile game. The game app will also include the Web comic, according to Inzen’s co-founder, Gerald Tock. Inzen was started in October last year, and is made of six developers, with the founders and writers in Singapore, and relies on some development work from China. Its Web comic was created by artists in Uruguay. The comic and its first game center on a character they created, G-man Studly. The game appears to be a tapping frenzy, with waves of enemies attacking G-man Studly from different corners of the screen, requiring you to tap on them furiously as your character scales a skyscraper. Tock said the team is hoping to make the rest of its project happen. It has enough material for another “larger” game and four mini games to be produced under the Game Show Warriors banner. It plans to wait for the response to the first episode to decide whether to continue, however. Besides having people download and play their games, Inzen is hoping that the investment into the online manga will get fans making derivative works such as fan fiction, videos or cosplaying as the characters. Inzen is angel-funded in the “low six figures”, said Tock. The five founding developers in Singapore are graduates from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. Prior to creating this project, some of them produced apps that enjoyed some success on the mobile scene. Dark Dot was a shooter they produced in 2011 that climbed to the top of the action charts in 48 countries including China, the US and Singapore, and was the top free iOS app in several Southeast Asian countries. Check out the trailer for Amazing Studly Strikes here:]]> <![CDATA[Gcorelab Gets $482,000 For New Battery Cooling Technology]]> A Singapore clean-tech company called Gcorelab has just received $482,000 (S$589,000) in funding for a new technology that promises to control the thermal issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries. Battery packs that use lithium-ion cells such as those found in laptops and, in larger deployments like electric cars, can suffer from cells failing. When the cells do and overheat, they can cause a chain reaction with neighboring cells, in a process known as thermal runway propagation, and this can lead to explosions. Gcorelab has patented its cooling technology. It relies on cooling plates, and the team claims that its “oblique fin technology” can achieve 50 to 80 percent better results compared with liquid cooling, while using the same amount of energy. Battery temperatures are managed by transferring heat away from components, and sensors help to regulate the cooling process, said Gcorelab co-founder, Ray Kung. It also works in cold climates, with heaters and coolers jumping in to keep things optimal, he added. (Batteries are finicky things; arctic temperatures can make them blow up, too.) “Currently, battery thermal management is transitioning from air cooling to liquid cooling systems. While affordable and easy to implement, air cooling is vastly inferior in terms of heat transfer performance compared to liquid cooling,” said Kung. So while the industry transitions to liquid cooling methods, Gcorelab is hoping its technology will provide a more affordable alternative to the latter. If successful, the company’s technology could spell revolution for the battery industry and reliant industries, because of the cooling needed to prevent overheating and explosions. Plenty of lithium-ion batteries have exploded over the years, from iPhones to electric toothbrushes. Bad enough to have something burst into flames while you’re brushing your teeth, but you can see why the airline and automotive industries are a lot antsier about safety standards regarding this. Boeing’s brand new Dreamliner 787 planes recently suffered battery overheating faults, and regulators ordered all 50 planes to be grounded—the first US fleet grounding to happen in 34 years. The grounding has reportedly cost Boeing an estimated $600 million, excluding other costs like compensation to airlines which have had business disrupted. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, has commented on Boeing’s battery woes. Musk’s diagnosis of Boeing’s design fault is that the 787 batteries have large cells placed close to each other. In order to minimize the cascading effects of thermal runway, Tesla cars use smaller battery cells]]> <![CDATA[Wealth Flees Switzerland For Shelter in Singapore]]> <![CDATA[Mall App Tracks Shoppers With Ultrasonic Device]]> The white device here (pictured next to a phone for scale) is in the process of getting mounted on store walls in Singapore malls. When active, the device will emit an ultrasonic signal that an app can pick up, and will allow participating stores to broadcast deals and rewards to shoppers. The device is called the iSenze, and is made by a startup in Singapore called Rainmaker Labs. Rainmaker’s bigger plan is to roll out a service called ShopGuru to stores, which allows them to list deals on it. Users who have the ShopGuru app can browse for deals. How it all connects is that some deals require users to physically step into these stores, and the iSenze will ensure that their presence is logged. Alex Leong, co-founder at Rainmaker Labs, showed me the device recently. The service isn’t live yet, but will be in a month or two. The company intends to get its clients properly onboard before launching, he said. Rainmaker is first targeting fashion brands and will go to F&B chains after that. It’s signed about 60 brands so far, and has been trialing the device in stores over the past six months. The company has a “six-digit” budget to push out its marketing campaign, so they’re taking their time to get it done right, he said. The way the app offers rewards is to award users points for browsing deals on it. You get more points for walking into the store, and should you buy anything, you can log your purchase with your user ID at check out for additional points. These points are redeemable for other goods from participating stores. On the retailer’s end, the ShopGuru service will provide a dashboard with some customer analytics in it, said Leong. This is derived from customer behavior in the app, as well as their physical movements, as tracked by the iSenze. This can provide more accurate feedback on what customers are interested in, and what deals don’t get picked up. It’s free for shops to sign up with the ShopGuru service, but Rainmaker takes a cut of the sales made through it. Rainmaker was founded in March 2011, and closed its first seed round of S$590,000 last November, led by Singaporean tech investor, Incuvest. Together with some angel funding at the start, Rainmaker has hit $800,000 so far, said Leong. Ronnie Wee, managing partner at Incuvest, said]]> <![CDATA[Dropmysite Upgrades As It Moves Into Enterprise Market]]> Dropmysite has beefed up its site backup product with new features, as it pushes harder into the enterprise market. Its product now includes features like incremental backups, public key authentication and PostgreSQL database support, it said. Backups start at 10Gb for $19.99. The Singaporean company was started in September 2011. But it was a side project, Dropmyemail that suddenly became a hit online and drew more attention over to Dropmysite. The email backup service was launched in March 2012, and promised to be an easy way to dump a backup copy of your webmail from services like Gmail and Yahoo onto its servers. Three months later, the company announced it had 650,000 new users. The feature upgrade to the parent product looks like it was a natural result of the company’s focus on enterprise deals. It’s been making deals with regional telcos and hosts in a mix of reselling and investing arrangements. This has allowed its financing to reach about $1.3 million (S$1.7 million) so far, according to Dropmysite. In January, the company signed a deal with Japanese cloud provider GMO Cloud for the latter to both invest a “six-figure sum” in Dropmyemail and resell the service in Japan. GMO Cloud, which belongs to the GMO Group has a customer base of about 130,000 businesses and 6,000 sales partners in its country. In addition to that, it has a deal with Xpress Hosting in Mexico, to resell into its Spanish-speaking user base. Xpress Hosting has about 600,000 sites on its servers. Dropmysite indicated that it is in the final stages of closing a deal with a Singapore telco, and intends to reach out to the latter’s 150,000 small and medium business customers. The deal took eight months to iron out, it said. Its next deal looks to be with a telco in India, as well. Dropmysite is also trying to expand its offices. It bought cloud drive site Orbitfiles in June last year, grabbing its user base of 235,000 primarily in the US, and opened an office in Dallas in August. Prior to the Orbitfiles acquisition, its main customer base was in Asia, especially in India and Indonesia, followed by South America, it said.]]> <![CDATA[Spotify Adds Three Asian Cities To Current 20 Served, Priced Lowest In Malaysia]]> Music streaming service, Spotify, has come to the three Asian cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Its premium service, priced at $9.90 per month in the US, will also be a little cheaper in the region, with Malaysians getting the lowest price. In Singapore, the service is priced monthly at $7.99 (S$9.90), in Hong Kong it’s $6.18 (48 HKD) and in Malaysia it will be $4.90 (14.9 MYR). It’s practically the new Big Mac Index of music subscribers, going by Spotify’s head of new markets, Sriram Krishnan. He told us the prices are a “sweet spot” based on deep studies of each market. Spotify does come for free, but it premium users will be able to use its mobile apps, and get functions like offline caching, where songs are stored in devices and can be played without an Internet connection. Premium users also listen at 320 kbps, while free accounts stream at 160 kbps. Krishnan said Spotify has 24 million “active” users (he couldn’t define what “active” means in Spotify terms), and 6 million of those are paying. In comparison, fellow US music streaming site, Pandora, said recently that it has a base of about 200 million users, of which 70 million log in each month. Spotify’s arrival in Asia marks one of the first times a paid streaming service has come to the region. Others such as Netflix and Pandora are missing. Users outside of the US used to be able to access Pandora by registering with a US postal code, but the service had to comply with DMCA regulations, and finally closed its doors to non-US users in 2007 through IP filtering. Krishnan would not give specifics on the deals made in Asia, but said that Spotify’s size makes it more of a force to reckon with during negotiations with industry execs. “We’ve been around for five years. In the past four years, we gave back $500 million to the music industry. This year, we will give back another $500 million. Having reached this scale, we’re now taken seriously,” he said. Media providers have been nervous coming into Asia because of piracy concerns. He acknowledged that piracy continues to be an issue here, but said that a premium service’s ability to offer a more convenient way to get content without going through the hassle of BitTorrenting a file would trump piracy. Of course BitTorrent is free, and you could theoretically capture a streamed track in all]]> <![CDATA[These Awesome Charts Highlight Just How Diversified (or Homogeneous) Some Nations' Exports Are]]> Ever wondered what the leading exports of Antarctica or North Korea or the Solomon Islands are? Well you've come to the right place. Courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons and the Observatory of Economic Complexity, Benzinga has compiled an array of export tree maps from countries and regions around the globe,

]]> <![CDATA[Singapore the 'Sick Man' of Southeast Asia: Credit Suisse]]> <![CDATA[Weekly Wrap Up: “We Have Not Forgotten”]]>

Watch the West Wing Week here.

Easter Egg Roll: On Monday, the First Family welcomed more than 30,000 guests to the South Lawn for the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll. The event was filled with activities ranging from the traditional Easter Egg Roll to readings from stars such as Danica Patrick, Adrian Peterson, and even Elmo.

The theme of “Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You,” was inspired by the First Lady’s Let’s Move! initiative, which seeks to solve the problem of childhood obesity. You can find demonstrations of healthy recipes from top chefs here and learn more about the Let’s Move! initiative here.

This year’s special guest was Robby Novak -- better known as Kid President. Be sure to also check out a special presidential video message from April 1.

Guns: On Thursday, President Obama traveled to Colorado to urge the American people to push Congress to vote on a set of common-sense proposals to help reduce gun violence. The President wants to close loopholes in the background check system to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and others who shouldn’t have them -- and prevent mass shootings like the one that killed 20 young children and six adults in Newtown, CT.

“If you want to buy a gun, whether it's from a licensed dealer or a private seller, you should at least have to pass a background check to show you're not a criminal or someone legally prohibited from buying one,” said the President. “And that's just common sense.”

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]]> <![CDATA[Luxola Raises Series A, Pulls Former PopSugar Director Christine Ng To Singapore]]> Singapore beauty e-tailer, Luxola, just raised its Series A round from GREE Ventures. The amount was undisclosed, but has been rumored to be in the region of $2 million. The company carries about 60 brands of cosmetics and beauty products on its website, and ships to countries in Southeast Asia like Singapore and Malaysia. Its site was launched in September 2012, and it had previously raised a seed round of about $596,820 (S$740,000) from Wavemaker Labs and Singapore government fund, the National Research Foundation. Its initial angel round was about $423,460 ($525,000), according to CEO and founder, Alexis Horowitz-Burdick. Besides its latest funding round, the company has also managed to pull over former PopSugar Director of Affiliates and Social, Christine Ng. Prior to that, she was product manager at Sephora, where she led the beauty store’s social media and interactive product efforts. She joins Luxola as its chief marketing officer. “We’re grateful for Christine. The sort of experience she has doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia yet because the community isn’t that old. She doesn’t just have online experience, but also directly with the beauty industry,” said Horowitz-Burdick. Before founding Luxola, she came to Singapore from Washington, DC about six years ago. She had started a group buying site called The Sweet Spot. “I wasn’t interested in the race to the bottom anymore,” she said, of the decision to sell higher-tier products. The average basket price for Luxola is about US$44 (S$55), she said. Luxola employs a staff of ten. Those are split into two on the engineering side, three handling creative and design tasks, and two marketing people. The new funding will allow Luxola to continue its expansion into the region and set up warehouses there, to complete fulfilment more easily. Currently, it has a warehouse space in Singapore and ships out of it.]]> <![CDATA[West Wing Week: 04/05/13 or “The Scientist-in-Chief”]]> This week, the President spoke on the importance of investing in infrastructure at Port Miami, and on reducing gun violence while at the Denver Police Academy. He hosted the Prime Minister of Singapore and Kid President, unveiled the BRAIN initiative, and rolled, read, and relaxed with some of the thousands of visitors to the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll.

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]]> <![CDATA[BillPin Acquires Obopay's BillMonk Bill-Splitting Service]]> After some years of languishing, BillMonk’s service and user base will be taken over by a young Singapore startup, BillPin, which provides a similar bill-splitting service. Just over six months old, BillPin pitches itself as a “Mint for groups” and offers a way for people to track how much money they owe each other. It has plenty of competitors in the bill-splitting space, including Splitwise, Billsup, Spotme, Divvyit, Splitmybill.ie; scooping up BillMonk’s user base might provide it a firm leg up in the fight for user acquisition. BillMonk was founded in 2005 and was acquired by Indian mobile money provider Obopay in 2007. It’s one of the older players in the space, and seems to have suffered from neglect for a few years. Some of its competitors have tried to capitalize on that. Splitwise launched a campaign to bring BillMonk users onboard last year. BillPin launched a similar service in October last year. BillPin’s co-founder, Darius Cheung (whose previous startup, tenCube WaveSecure, was acquired by McAfee in 2010), acknowledged the older firm’s state of neglect. ”Not much improvement was added to BillMonk at all over the past seven years, and in fact BillMonk has suffered significant down time in the last six months or so,” he said. Of the migration service BillPin created, he said: “It was launched to catch BillMonk users who were frustrated with its downtime, but we didn’t know then we were going to inherit its entire user base.” Still, BillMonk continued to add users over its lifetime, and steadily at that, he said. As a result, bringing BillMonk’s user base onboard will give BillPin “easily 50 times” more users. He wouldn’t say how many that is, but according to reports, BillPin has a small base of 5,000 or so users. He made it clear that this move was an acquisition of the larger service’s user base, but none of BillMonk’s engineers will come over from Obopay. BillPin has five employees in Singapore and one in India. It’s bootstrapped so far, but Cheung is currently hoping to raise an angel round. Obopay started in 2005, and provides technology to corporate clients like Nokia and Societe Generale, and telcos like Warid Telecom in Uganda to allow them to offer their own branded mobile money-transfer services. It was started in Bangalore, and now has its headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. It has Bangalore and Mumbai offices.]]> <![CDATA[President Obama Meets with Prime Minister Lee of Singapore]]>
President Barack Obama delivers remarks with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of the Republic of Singapore

President Barack Obama delivers remarks with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of the Republic of Singapore prior to a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, April 2, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

In a bilateral meeting today with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore, President Obama reaffirmed America's commitment to a secure and prosperous Asia-Pacific region, and thanked Prime Minster Lee for being “an outstanding partner for us on the international stage.”

In addition to close military cooperation between the two countries that allows the United States to maintain an effective presence the Pacific, Singapore is also a strong economic partner.

“Over the last decade, since we signed our free trade agreement, we have seen a doubling of trade between our countries, and that creates jobs here in the United States as well as in Singapore,” the President said.

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]]> <![CDATA[Singapore Investors Fearless Even as Home Prices Ease]]> <![CDATA[Singaporean Sushi Bar Acquires Tech Firm, Turns Founders Into Sushi Chefs]]> A Singaporean sushi chain has acquired a game psychology company in what looks like an acquisition of the latter’s four founders. Standing Sushi Bar, which runs three outlets in Singapore and another in Jakarta, said it bought Gametize for an eight-digit sum. Gametize has a platform called GameMaki that gives clients a way to work challenges into their customer-facing services. It’s been working with Standing Sushi Bar since 2011, when the sushi restaurant started listing weekly “challenges” at its outlets in exchange for points to be redeemed for discounts. While Gametize’s CEO, Keith Ng, will become the sushi bar’s technology head and CTO, Damon Widjaja, will manage Indonesia’s technology office, it seems Standing Sushi Bar wants them for more than their technology prowess. Both Ng and Widjaja are set to undergo formal training as sushi chefs. Gametize’s two other founders, Jesslyn Teo and Brenda Nicole Tan, will run a new fusion sushi concept bar to be opened in Singapore called Sushitize. Standing Sushi Bar’s CEO is Howard Lo, a former long-time Microsoft employee. PS: It’s April 1, guys.]]> <![CDATA[Sequoia Capital In Singapore After A Year, Has Yet To Invest In A Local Startup]]> When Sequoia Capital India landed in Singapore, the buzz around town was that a big-name US fund being in the country was going to really jolt the market and provide serious cred to the startups here. The Indian team running operations here, however, appears to have spent the last year of its time in the island state helping its Indian funds expand into Singapore, rather than directly investing in startups here. Singapore is a popular choice as a base for foreign companies looking to expand into Southeast Asia. Early last year, Sequoia Capital India MD, Shailendra Jit Singh, expressed interest in having the fund’s companies expand into the region. Sequoia Cap in the US also appeared to have been eyeing activity in Singapore for a while—it had its first offsite meeting in the country in 2011, and was in discussion with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong about its presence here. The Prime Minister’s Office oversees its R&D arm, the National Research Foundation (NRF), which has been busy backing local venture capital firms here over the past few years. Its Technology Incubation Scheme is a program that matches funds picked by 11 appointed VCs here, in the proportion of 85 percent to 15 percent—the larger portion dished out by the government. This allows the VCs here to provide bigger sums of seed capital to startups, with much of the risk absorbed by the NRF. Former NRF projects head, Yinglan Tan, was also pulled over to Sequoia Capital India’s team in July last year, where he is now a venture partner based in Singapore. When I ran into Tan in Manila a couple of months ago, he was evasive about the funds they’re looking at in Singapore, but was happy to try to set up meetings with their existing funds in Singapore—all Indian-based startups, except for Airbnb and Evernote. Some of these companies that are being incubated in Singapore by Sequoia Cap include Via, Druva, Mu Sigma, Idea Device and Practo. The meetings never happened, but word on the street is that Tan has been meeting with some Singapore-based startups that are approaching Series A or B in size, and are looking to expand beyond the island. One that I know of provides Wi-Fi infrastructure. As for its current startups here, Via is pretty sizable. It operates a flight booking portal similar to Expedia and Zuji, and has about 1,200 employees,]]> <![CDATA[Some High-Yield Dividend ETFs Off the Beaten Path]]> ]]> <![CDATA[WealthMastery.Sg Brings the Pathway to Prosperity Event with Stuart Tan, Asia’s Top Coach]]> <![CDATA[Singaporean Ad-Matching Platform AdzCentral Gets $3.2M Series A]]> AdzCentral, an ad-matching platform from Singapore, has received $3.2 million (S$4 million) in funding from Electric Sheep Capital and Digital Media Partners . The company provides an engine to advertisers that serves up ads based on targeted audience demographics. Companies spell out the parameters of their intended audience and AdzCentral’s ads are displayed to people based on what sites they’ve visited (tracked through cookies) or other information shared by partner sites. Some companies call it “programmatic buying”, or “smart media buying”, or other permutations of the word “intelligent”, really, but it’s basically ad-matching. These providers are also responsible for the ads that seem to chase you around different websites pushing information that seems to be all-too-appropriate, such as previously browsed shop items. The company’s founder and CEO, Reza Behnam said he industry estimates peg the US market for ad-matching to be worth about $6 billion in 2015, making up about 25 percent of digital display ads in that year. This is up from 13 percent last year, representing some impressive growth, if it happens. And in Asia, digital ad spend is about $25 billion, with only 3 percent of that based on ad-matching. That will become 20 percent in 2015, he said, citing other analyst estimates. It’s the Asia angle that he’s counting on. AdzCentral competes with US giants like Rocket Fuel and Acceleration (acquired by WPP), but being in Asia allows it to serve advertisers or Asian subsidiaries of MNCs, said Behnam. It counts brands like SingTel, Standard Chartered, Hyundai and 3M as clients, and has served about 1,000 companies over a base of 100 clients in its three years of operations. The company isn’t profitable yet, he said, but is planning to spend its Series A money in Southeast Asian expansion efforts. It has “quietly launched” in Thailand and Malaysia so far, with people on the ground. It hasn’t set up offices in those countries, but it is looking to, he said. Vietnam and the Philippines will come later, and it has some advertising partners in India and the Middle East, he said. There are about twenty employees on the ground right now. AdzCentral started in 2010, and won “seven-digit” seed funding in August that year from a group of angels that included the Singapore government’s National Research Foundation (NRF) and Joichi Ito-fronted Neoteny Labs. Behnam was formerly the managing director of Yahoo for Southeast Asia in 2004,]]> <![CDATA[PayPal Stops Charity Donations From Singapore Accounts]]> PayPal phases out donations to non-profits and charities from Singapore accounts starting tomorrow, the 21st of March, and will complete this by the end of the month. This decision is a result of PayPal failing to get a remittance license in the country from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. PayPal was able to offer remittance services over the years, till the governing body issued an instruction recently that required PayPal to stop this function in lieu of a license. Besides donations, buying goods from non-profits overseas is also not allowed, because they aren’t registered as commercial entities. The only way for a Singapore account holder to donate to a foreign charity through PayPal is if the latter has a Singapore arm set up in the country and registers itself with the payments provider. Phasing out donations is the second step of the company’s reaction to the regulatory instruction, which saw it halt personal payments made from Singapore accounts, explained PayPal’s Vice President of Asia-Pacific merchant services, Lawrence Chan. He said the proportion of donations being made overseas was “very very small” from account holders here, and added that PayPal has not tried to grow this portion of its business over the years, choosing to focus on commercial transactions (which bring it actual revenue, obviously). PayPal’s policies differ from country-to-country, depending on regulators. In India, payments to non-profits in the country isn’t allowed either. Japanese users can donate to charities, but personal payments were halted in 2010. Users in Taiwan and Brazil also can’t do personal payments.]]> <![CDATA[Nonstop Games Raises $2.9m Usd Seed Funding For Its Immersive, Real-time, Free-to-play Games]]> <![CDATA[Singapore Restaurant Booking Site Chope Raises $2.5M Series B]]> Chope has raised $2.5 million (S$3.2 million) in Series B funding. The round was led by local publishing house, Singapore Press Holdings, which now owns 27.8% of the startup, valued at $1.4 million (S$1.81 million). Chope operates a similar service to OpenTable, and allows restaurant bookings through its website and mobile apps. It provides a restaurant booking backend system licensed from a UK provider to its member restaurants, and that links up to its web front end to allow the bookings to be made. The news was disclosed quietly to the Singapore Stock Exchange over the weekend from Singapore Press Holdings. The Singaporean startup launched in 2011, and expanded to cover Hong Kong in mid-2012. It has 224 restaurants on its roster, and makes about 10,000 reservations a week, according to Arrif Ziaudeen, its CEO and co-founder. It celebrated its millionth diner served in July last year. The company also managed to get its app preloaded onto the Samsung Galaxy S3 models sold in Singapore. The obvious inspiration for Chope’s creation, OpenTable, began operations in San Francisco in 1999, and has about 25,000 restaurants in its database. Like OpenTable, Chope’s service is free to users, and the company charges restaurants a fee to use its reservation booking system, with additional fees per diner coming in through the website. OpenTable has expanded to include other European markets such as France, Germany and the UK in recent years. Additional questions have been sent to Chope on how much control Singapore Press Holdings will have over its day-to-day operations, now that the publisher owns a decent chunk of it.]]> <![CDATA[Ex-Asia Head of Facebook Mobile Joins Jungle Ventures As Entrepreneur-In-Residence]]> Jungle Ventures, a VC in Singapore, has added Alon Sobol as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR). Sobol was up till last year head of mobile partnerships for Facebook in Asia, and has been an advisor for Asian startups, Mobikon and Viki, in the past year. In Jungle Ventures, he will mentor the VC’s existing portfolio companies in its space, and work together with the company’s other partners to fund and develop his own startups ideas. Amit Anand, co-founder and managing partner of Jungle Ventures, said one area lacking in Asia is expertise in understanding how user interface changes impact monetization. “Adding an removing landing page options can change conversion rates, for example, which fewer startups understand here. Alon has built up that expertise in his time at Facebook,” he said. Anurag Srivastava, who co-founded Jungle Ventures with Anand, said an EIR program is typically a way for VC firms or investors to nurture a big idea and invest in it at the end of the EIR’s term. Jungle Ventures wants Sobol to add to that by mentoring the firms there too. Sobol started his career with Toronto-based VC incubator, Brightspark, and was a founding team member of Think Dynamics (later sold to IBM for $50 million). He has a Masters of Electronic Commerce from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and a BA in International Relations from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.]]> <![CDATA[SAP Opens Singapore-Based Co-Innovation Lab]]> SAP just opened another co-innovation lab, this time in Singapore. The lab is its 21st globally, and the fourth in the Asia-Pacific region. The German software giant hopes it will allow member organizations to have a space to experiment with different hardware and software combinations, and provides its cloud infrastructure to them to back this. The aim, it says, is to encourage the creation of new technologies with the environment. The Singapore facility has the support of other vendors Cisco, Intel, NetApp and VMware, who will make their products available to members. The co-innovation lab sits in a larger facility that SAP established in 2011 here, called the Global Research and Business Incubation center in Singapore, which serves as the company’s Asia-Pacific research headquarters. While today was the official opening of the co-innovation space, some startups in the country have been testing out the space, said SAP. YFind Technologies, based in the island state, is one that has used the lab to build its indoor location positioning product. It’s trying to provide a way for stores to get foot traffic analytics laid over the location data, which can be used to reach out with marketing campaigns. The first such lab was opened in Palo Alto in 2007, and had vendors like Citrix Systems and F5 coming in on the infrastructure side, as well as Cisco, Intel and NetApp again.]]> <![CDATA[Rent-Your-Car-Out Service iCarsClub Gets $482,000]]> iCarsClub, a service that allows people to rent out their cars by the hour just got a seed round of almost half a million, a little under three months since its launch. The Singapore-based startup provides a service similar to Zipcar, except car owners rent out their own vehicles and iCarsClub doesn’t own or provide the cars. The company will install a piece of hardware in members’ vehicles, which will allow the renter to unlock the doors with a phone app. The cars are connected to a central server which sends the locking command. iCarsClub was just launched in December, and the team is using its home state of Singapore to test the concept. The team of five have plans to quickly expand to China within the year, and are eyeing Beijing and Shanghai. It has set a target to attract 5,000 members and 1,000 cars in Singapore, and another 1,000 cars in China by end-year. The startup was funded by Red Dot Ventures, a VC in Singapore affiliated with the government’s National Research Foundation (NRF) effort. The NRF backs investments pledged by its appointed VCs in the country, to a ratio of 85 percent for 15 percent raised by the VCs. iCarsClub’s CEO is Eddy Zhang, and the team includes Joya Zhao Hong, Chengkun Xue and Jack Wei Liuwei.]]> <![CDATA[Are Asia's Property Markets Too Hot to Handle?]]> <![CDATA[Travelmob Continues Push Into Asian ‘Airbnb’ Market]]> Singapore-based short term home rental marketplace, Travelmob is pushing steadily into the space with new features on its site. Today, it released a way for home owners to list last-minute discounts to travelers. This follows an earlier feature released last year which allowed travelers to find listings by descriptive tags. The company is yet another in the quickly crowding Airbnb-style space, which tries to match home renters with couch surfers or travelers looking for a quick stay. Lately, more of these sites have been trying to differentiate by varying a little from the budget crowd and offering unique locales. Travelmob, for example, has a listing for a houseboat in Kerala and an entire island in the Philippines which comes with a chef and butler. Last September, the company secured $1 million in seed funding in a round raised by Singapore VC, Jungle Ventures. And in November, it teamed up with Wego.com to provide its listings to the flight search aggregator. It wouldn’t say how many listings there are on Travelmob right now, but it had about 2,300 properties in the Asia-Pacific region at time of launch. And since then, those have multiplied by five times, it said. One of the startup’s co-founders, Turochas Fuad, was most recently managing director for Skype Asia, and the head of Yahoo’s Southeast Asian mobile business prior to that.]]> <![CDATA[Smartphone Rental Startup Handy Expands Out Of Hong Kong]]> Handy, a smartphone rental service out of Hong Kong, has launched operations in Singapore. The company offers smartphones for rent to travelers at $9 (HKD 68) a day—$12 (S$15) a day in Singapore—and the price includes unlimited 3G data and international calls. The Handy brand comes under its CEO, Terence Kwok’s startup effort called Tink Labs, and is its first and only project thus far. The firm is less than a year old, but today has 75 people working for it. It started in April last year, and in September launched Handy in Kwok’s home country of Hong Kong. So far, it has placed its service counters at tourist hot spots, such as at the Hong Kong International Airport, as well as the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai and a visitor center run by the country’s tourism board located in the Tsim Sha Tsui district. Kwok, who was born in Hong Kong but raised in the US, said the decision to expand so soon in Singapore was in large part accelerated by the local tourism board’s offer to allow Handy to set up a service desk at its visitor center along the Orchard Road shopping street. “We weren’t planning to launch in Singapore till the second quarter of the year, initially,” he said. Handy’s devices are primarily Samsung Galaxy Note phones, and its software developers have put a custom UI on them that opens at a landing page with deals and recommendations for sightseeing and restaurants. It’s still populating the Singapore version with more content, but its Hong Kong version includes deals with tours and ticketed items such as ferry rides that you can book through the app. Just show the phone at the venue and you’re set, said Kwok. What I found surprising about the UI was that the company will also let you install apps from Google Play, which many firms don’t allow. It’ll also allow tethering, so for the price, you could tether a laptop in a pinch and get some surfing done outside of a Wi-Fi zone. So far, Handy has 2,000 phones in its inventory, and is looking to strike up bulk deals with Android manufacturers to increase its stock. When a user rents out a device, the company puts an authorization hold on their credit cards, so in the event of a device getting broken or lost, the amount to fix or]]> <![CDATA[Yota To Mass Produce E-ink Phone In Singapore]]> Russian phone maker, Yota Devices, will start making its first dual-screen e-ink YotaPhones in Singapore. The company has signed with Hi-P, a manufacturer in the country, to have it mass produce the devices. Yota’s COO, Lau Geckler, told us that he is also in Singapore to help set up Yota’s Asian sales office and the company’s second R&D facility. Its original R&D center is in Finland, and it has development teams in Russia and the US, he said. The company is now hiring mainly sales and marketing staff for Asia and in the US to add to the 55 people it has in its headquarters in Russia, which take care of software development and design. Geckler, who joined Yota last year in August, said the company has been on an aggressive hiring spree, and that the team has grown from 15 when he joined, to its current size. When I met him, he showed me the YotaPhone. The charger was hastily bound to the phone by a rubber band, and he apologized, noting that it is still in prototype form, but the company expects to iron all those kinks out together with Hi-P here, as it takes it to mass production. He wouldn’t talk of how many phones they had committed to make here, but I get the feeling that once things ramp up, Yota could be free to move the process to a cheaper location in China, perhaps. Geckler said that the company intends to own as much of the manufacturing process’ IP as possible. Still, it won’t be for a while. He said that Yota isn’t looking to sign on more manufacturing partners for now, and it is keen to first start selling in Russia, before moving into Asian markets, particularly Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Hong Kong, where interest has been high. Japanese users, in particular, tend to hold both e-ink e-reader devices and smartphones, so the product seems fit for them, he added. Yota was a spin-off of Russian operator, Yota, in December 2011. Yota recently merged with a fellow operator in the country, Megafon. Back in Russia, Yota also sells LTE modems, routers and dongles. It’s sold 3 million of these devices so far, and last year sold a million.]]> <![CDATA["Singapore is not serious …"]]> <![CDATA[Singapore Fashion Retailer Inverted Edge Takes $1.6M Funding]]> A Singaporean fashion retail site has secured $1.6 million (S$2 million) in funding from a government-backed group of VCs. When it launches next month, the e-tailer, called Inverted Edge, will carry a consignment of goods from Asia-Pacific designers, according to CEO, Debra Langley. The funding it received was from the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF), Incuvest, Accel-X and four other undisclosed private investors. Incuvest is a government-appointed VC under its Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS), which offers 85 percent of a decided sum from the NRF if Incuvest comes up with the remaining 15 percent. The online fashion scene is seeing a surge in retail startups mushrooming, against a backdrop of larger global players like Asos.com. In Asia, the market is further split with massive marketplaces like Taobao’s Tmall and Rakuten. Langley said that Inverted Edge doesn’t plan to compete with the likes of Asos, but hopes to differentiate by focusing on shoppers outside of Asia keen to buy from designers in the region. She said that Inverted Edge will stick to a more high-fashion branding, and has secured some exclusive designs that it will bring on launch day. The company has a new warehouse space in the country, and is in the process of stocking it. Inverted Edge sounds like the obvious offspring of Langley’s career: prior to this, she was the Asia-Pacific president for Brussels-headquartered freight forwarder Borderlinx, and before, the president of DKNY Jeans’ international operations. Here’s a preview of what to expect, ahead of its launch in March.]]> <![CDATA[On potentially unsustainable immigration in Singapore]]> <![CDATA[e27 Gets $615K, Plans Southeast Asia Expansion]]> Singaporean media outfit, e27, has raised about US$615,000 (S$760,000) through a funding round with investors in the region, and plans to expand into Southeast Asia. The round was raised with B Dash Ventures from Japan, Pinehurst Advisors in Taiwan, Ardent Capital in Thailand and Dan Neary in Singapore. e27 has been around since 2006 and runs a news site on tech startups in Asia, and organizes conferences. Mohan Belani, e27’s CEO and co-founder, said that he is looking to hire editorial staff in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company’s focus, however, will remain on its annual flagship event called Echelon, he added. Last year, about 3,000 people attended Echelon, which also drew 50 startups and 150 investors. Echelon 2013 will be held on June 4 and 5 in Singapore this year. After this funding round, B Dash Ventures CEO, Hiroyuki Watanabe, will join e27’s board. Current members are Nic Lim (8capita) and founders, Belani and Thaddeus Koh. Belani said that the company has been bootstrapped so far, except for a small angel round raised in early 2012 by 8capita.]]> <![CDATA[Guggenheim Rolls Out Singapore Dollar Currency ETF]]> ]]> <![CDATA[World's Most Expensive Cities]]> DailyFinance.com: See the full gallery of the Top 10 Most Expensive Cities at CNNMoney More from CNNMoney: 10 things you'll pay more for in 2013 6 things you'll pay less for in 2013 Cheapest cars to fuel ... Read more]]> <![CDATA[Singapore Incubator JFDI.Asia Announces The Roster For Its First 2013 Accelerator Program]]> JFDI.Asia, the incubator program that seeks to "innovate in Asia, for Asia," just announced the eight startups that will be part of its accelerator program. The competition, which pushes teams to take an idea to investment in 100 days, begins on Feb. 21 at JFDI.Asia's new purpose-built facility in Singapore.]]> <![CDATA[BlackBerry Searching High and Low in India, Indonesia]]> <![CDATA[Iran Oil Exports to Asia Fell by a Quarter in 2012]]> <![CDATA[Singapore's High Cost of Living May Come at a Cost]]> <![CDATA[Corporates Get Tough Lesson in FX Risk from Central Bank]]> <![CDATA[RPT-ANALYSIS-Gas at the gates of oil's transport fuel citadel]]> <![CDATA[GLOBAL ECONOMY-China, U.S. manufacturing jumps, Europe inches forward]]> <![CDATA[UPDATE 5-Oil holds above $112 on upbeat China, U.S. data]]>