Simon Newstead (CEO of Frenzoo) Speaker at Echelon 2012

Simon Newstead, CEO of Frenzoo, a startup creating a new class of 3D lifestyle and fashion games for women. Their apps, include the popular Me Girl™ series of mobile games (www.megirl.com), are based on its flexible and innovative avatar technology platform that brings characters to life. Simon is one of the awesome speakers at Echelon 2012.

Before Frenzoo, Simon has worked many late nights living in labs at Telstra to help design 2nd generation broadband infrastructure (DSL network) as a young engineer.

After which, he joined Juniper Networks, the upstart competitor to Cisco where he was leading the Emerging Technologies team for Asia, dealing with customers in Korea and Japan through to emerging countries like India and Vietnam.

Frenzoo is a startup creating a new class of 3D lifestyle and fashion games for women.Their apps, including the popular Me Girl™ series of mobile games (www.megirl.com), are based on their flexible and innovative avatar technology platform that brings characters to life.

Simon Newstead (CEO of Frenzoo) Speaker at Echelon 2012

Last month, Frenzoo received US $1 million in new seed funding from investors based in Asia, Europe and the United States.

Investors include:

Efficient Corporate, the investment vehicle of Hong Kong-based angel investor Tytus Michalski; Siemer Ventures, an early-stage, cross-border venture firm with offices in Los Angeles and Asia; K5 Ventures, a pan Europe- and Asia-based group focused on media and commerce; Metaverse Services, a China-based leader in game content creation.

With the recent funding round, could you update us on Frenzoo’s plans for the next 6 months?

We plan to go to market with our mobile lifestyle games and scale up our user base and revenues.We’re also looking to expand into local markets in Asia as well as global English speaking markets.

Could you share with us your experience on your fundraising and tips on how startups can approach their next funding round?

The key thing is to first build something that people love. Metrics and traction speak for itself, and maks fundraising a much more pleasant experience!  Once you have a great product, make sure you’re presenting it in its best light – practice your pitch and get out and network to find opportunities.

Simon Newstead (CEO of Frenzoo) Speaker at Echelon 2012

How is the startup scene in Hong Kong maturing and what else is needed to spur the growth?

It’s growing a lot, particularly in the last couple of years.  There is a baseline of government support and a number of incubators and accelerators popping up to help startups get off the ground.

Where do you think 3D technology is heading in the next couple of years?

We’ll see it used even more in mobile consumer applications, whether functional (maps/fitting room etc) or entertainment (games/recreations of celebs etc)

Simon Newstead (CEO of Frenzoo) is one of the awesome speakers at Echelon 2012. This tech conference is a two-day, double-track event on 11 and 12 June 2012 with over 1,100 delegates, a demo pit of up to 50 regional startups per day and various workshops. Get your tickets now!

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced today that Pixel Media will be the exclusive advertising representative for Skype in Hong Kong.

Skype will now be available as an advertising option for online and mobile advertising, and advertisers will also be able to reach other Microsoft properties, says Leslie Chu, the company’s general manager of advertising in Hong Kong and Taiwan:

We’re excited that advertisers in Hong Kong can now be part of the Skype experience. By including Skype into MSN, Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail, we are able to offer advertisers unparalleled reach across very intimate and unique communication platforms.

Pixel Media’s CEO Kevin Huang noted that his company is pleased to have been selected by Microsoft, pointing out the importance of a platform like Skype in the digital advertising landscape in the region. In addition to Hong Kong, we’re told that in the Asia region, advertising is available on Skype in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan.

Indeed it was just last year we when saw Japanese advertising agency Dentsu sign a deal to be Skype’s exclusive advertiser in Japan, that particular agreement focusing on display ads in the “Skype Home area,” for Windows only. This partnership with Pixel Media, we are informed this afternoon, is also for the Windows platform only.

The announcement also notes that the destination resort Galaxy Macau is the first advertiser to get on board.

The Snapshock Team. Photo:Snapshock

Experience being a reporter or paparazzi with Snapshock, the latest mobile app that allows users to broadcast photos live through their mobile phones.

Other than real time event broadcast, the app offers event check-ins and boasts of a new-patented technology that integrates real-time 2D images to 3D. Snapshock has covered many different events but specializes in covering live wedding events.

Innovators of this dynamic and creative mobile app comprise of a trio, Peter Choi, Data Fok and Kin Tang.

e27 talks to Peter Choi, to find out more about Snapshock and their plans for Echelon 2012 Sartup Marketplace.

How did the idea of Snapshock come about? Were wedding couples the initial target market?

When iPad 2 was launched, the whole world was concerned if Steve Jobs was going to be on stage at that very moment. On top of mere text based tweets, there’s a clear demand of live photos broadcast centralized for a specific event.

Apart from that, our team has also discovered other prominent problems such as having to share photos in the old-fashioned way amongst a group of friends. (I.e. copying via USB drive, DVD etc.) Sometimes we may also want to share large set of photos, but not to facebook given that one may not be personally attached to the photos. Also, we thought that it’d be a great idea if participants or helpers at a wedding banquest could be more engaged and take photos of the guests and show it live on a big projector screen.

There are more than 10 millions weddings happening globally every year. Thus weddings became our initial target market given that it is huge and recurrent. It also helped that the industry was our expertise since I am also running another startup, Hiwave Dry Seafood, specializing in wedding gifts services, with existing partnership and customer base.

In fact Snapshock was test launched in my own wedding banquet in March.

The Snapshock office. Photo: Snapshock

How did you and the two team members meet and work together on this startup?

We were high school classmates and have known each another for over 10 years. The team was formed in 2008 and Snapshock was pivoted three times. The current product is our fourth version.

Photo sharing was our original concept and previous products included photo album hosting, photos aggregation, photo slideshows, etc. The current Snapshock solution has been proven to be the most comprehensive and our team has definitely matured much more in terms of market analysis throughout the process.

How is the traction for Snapshock like and what are some of the feedback you’ve gotten from users so far?

Snapshock has currently more than 10,000 downloads. End users have given us a lot of feature related feedback  that is leading us to our subsequent modification in user experience and program flow. Corporate customers also made certain suggestions from the business perspective. We may make slight adjustments to our pricing and business model in the near future.

Snapshock is only available on iPhone now while the Android application will be coming soon.

Discussions at the Snapshock office. Photo: Snapshock

What are some of Snapshock’s expansion plans? E.g. partnerships, feature developments, market expansion, etc.

Current partners of Snapshock include wedding studios, wedding planners and hotels. In the future, we want to target other event types including PR firms, government departments and other businesses.

In terms of features, Snapshock will start to include video uploading and streaming. We are also researching to integrate 2D to 3D conversion technology to allow normal mobile phones to take 3D photos through our platform.

Snapshock sees Hong Kong as our pilot market and will gradually expand globally.

How has Snapshock strategized these expansion plans since the photo app market is very saturated?

With Instagram and other photo apps are already in place, we crafted our positioning very carefully. Snapshock is more like an events app rather than a photo app. Our customers are event organizers instead of photographers, and people will use Snapshock for on-purpose photography instead of leisure photography.

Upcoming new features for Snapshock will all be related to events. While it is possible Snapshock may cross with social networking arena in the future, our development pace will be carefully calculated to retain customer acceptance and to out run potential competitors.

Who or what would you be looking for at Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace? (investments, partnerships, expansion, etc.)

Investments and partnerships will be our primary concerns. Coming from Hong Kong, we are also eager to understand more about the Singapore startup ecosystem. We have learnt something and built some network in Taiwan satellites and we anticipate to leverage on that even more in Singapore.

Snapshock will be exhibiting at Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace in June.

Clint Nelsen (Co-founder & Director of Startup Weekend) Speaker at Echelon 2012

No stranger to the startup world, Clint Nelsen is the Co-founder and Director of Startup Weekend. He was listed in Forbes as a “Name You Need to Know In 2011″ and was featured on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine.

Passionate about startups and technology, Clint Nelsen is a regular entrepreneurship lecturer at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. On 11th and 12th June, he will be part of the panel that will be discussing Startup Growth and Scaling at Echelon 2012 in Singapore.

Startup Weekend was initially created as an event where a group of individuals would brainstorm a single business idea and work to bring that business to fruition over the course of the weekend.

Today, Startup Weekend has grown into an organization with a global presence, having organized at least 207 events spanning 120 cities and 35 countries. It has also has built a network of more than 25,000 alumni, 150 volunteer organizers and 60 trained facilitators spread across more than 175 cities in 500 countries.

In March last year, Startup Weekend became an affiliate of the Kauffman Foundation, the largest foundation for entrepreneurship in the world.

Clint Nelsen is also the co-author of Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company from Concept to Creation in 54 Hours, alongside Marc Nager and Franck Nouyrigat.

The book contains best practices, lessons learnt and empowering examples derived from Startup Weekend’s experiences for individuals and startups to follow as they launch new businesses. Each of the key beliefs have been tried, tested and proven to yield positive results and will give any business idea a greater chance for success.

Brian Wong, Founder and CEO of Kiip, and fellow speaker at Echelon 2012 commented about the book, “Startup Weekend is the most current account of how the modern tech entrepreneur will operate and succeed. Sure, the person, the hustle, the persistence, and the environment all account toward success—but to hit your key fundamentals, this book will be the best.”

Clint Nelsen has been featured in many publications around the world including the New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Entrepreneur Magazine, Glamour Magazine.

Clint Nelsen (Co-founder & Director of Startup Weekend) Speaker at Echelon 2012

Clint Nelsen recently founded Startup Labs. Startup Labs is a global seed stage investment fund aiming to disrupt the startup scene by reinventing the traditional incubation process and helping companies launch in various countries. It operates a three week program in cities around the world investing seed capital into 5 teams in each city.

Working with local investment partners and shares the local investment in the startups, Startup Labs will host 15 events in 15 countries for 2012 with the goal of 100+ cities happening soon. Startup Labs is open to all investors and all team may apply. The best way to think of the program is 500 startups meets Startup Weekend with teams building startups in countries around the globe.

When he is not busy with startups and events, Clint is a pilot, enjoys mountain biking, snowboarding, camping and photography.

He also loves traveling.

Clint Nelsen (Co-founder & Director of Startup Weekend) is one of the awesome speakers at Echelon 2012. This tech conference is a two-day, double-track event on 11 and 12 June 2012 with over 1,100 delegates, a demo pit of up to 50 regional startups per day and various workshops. Get your tickets now!

Frenzoo announces new round of investment to push product out to market

Frenzoo, the pioneer of a new class of 3D lifestyle and fashion mobile games, today announced it has received US $1 million in new seed funding from investors based in Asia, Europe and the United States. The investors include: Efficient Corporate, the investment vehicle of Hong Kong-based angel investor Tytus Michalski; Siemer Ventures, an early-stage, cross-border venture firm with offices in Los Angeles and Asia; K5 Ventures, a Pan-Europe and Asia-based group focused on media and commerce; and Metaverse Services, a China-based leader in game content creation. They join existing investor Ambient Sound Investments, an early stage venture firm backed by the founding engineers of Skype.

According to Frenzoo, they will use the funds to accelerate the launch of its Me Girl brand of titles (www.megirl.com) that offer lifestyle and fashion mobile games for all ages. Data from mobile analytics firm Flurry shows that women make up a majority of the mobile social gaming audience. The Me Girl titles aim to be the first 3D games crafted specifically for this market. With its female-centric apps, Frenzoo is looking at targeting women of all ages, in US and around the world, and its first app, Style Me Girl will launch on iOS, Android and Kindle Fire within the next month.

“We believe there is a tremendous opportunity to combine the best of mobile gaming with the world of fashion and lifestyle,” said Frenzoo CEO & Co-founder Simon Newstead. “Our goal with Me Girl is to leverage glamour and emotional appeal to create fun, accessible gaming experiences. With our innovative 3D platform, we can create interactive characters with natural movements and expressions that really bring the whole story to life.”

Frenzoo has came a long way. The promising team pitched at our unConference 2009, secured a seed round with the founding engineers of Skype, and recently, they won the Startup Contest by Yetizen, a San Francisco-based game startup accelerator. The competition was held as part of Game Developers Conference 2012, an annual conference on game development, sharing tools, tips and technologies.

Simon will also be speaking at Echelon, a two-day, double-track event on 11 and 12 June 2012 with over 1,100 delegates.

Hong Kong startup, iDonate is the first comprehensive charity rating platform in Hong Kong aimed at promoting informed donation by promoting transparency of charity and evaluating their operating efficiency and needs of funds.

I recently caught up with CEO & Founder of iDonate, Bonita Wang to find out more about the charity rating platform.

What led you to create iDonate and what’s the painpoint that it aims to solve?
I have a friend, Tammy who holds her birthday party yearly.Instead of getting her presents, she recommends all her friends to make donations and select the charity organisation receiving it together. Sometimes, her friends may argue between choosing the charities that will receive the donation.

This led me to think. We looked up Openrice, a comprehensive foodstore guide in Hong Kong that provides food ratings from users, when we were going to buy a cup of ice-cream. We were thinking, “Why don’t we have a platform to input all the information and ratings of charities for donors let them make smarter donation decisions?” As a result, I built iDonate.

Later on, I found that there were charities committing fraud or not using the donation properly. People care how the charities are using the money donated because the donation market is large. In 2010, total donation amounted to US $1.1 billion in Hong Kong, and over US $8 billion in China.

The iDonate Team. Photo: iDonate

How is the traction so far and what are some of the feedbacks you have received?

One week after the official launch, we were featured by a local newspaper. In the past 16 months, we have over 40 media coverages including TV, radio, magazine and newspaper.  We also made it to the headlines on Yahoo news.

All these showed that people do care how charities are spending the donation.  We have hit the market demand and our work has been recognized by the public. Besides, we have started generating income by providing service to University of Hong Kong this year.

We have received many supportive messages from users and charities.  Some examples include:
(1) Steven, a fresh graduate, said that iDonate help to solve the real problem as he and his girlfriend didn’t know which charities to support.
(2) Silence, a small and local charity in Hong Kong (which is not well known) is very transparent and accountable. The organisation said iDonate help them to differentiate Silence from other improper charities.
(3) Private banking people also take reference of iDonate’s information before making donation recommendation to clients.

Being a Hong Kong-based company, what are some of your market expansion plans and the company’s roadmap?

We do not limit ourselves in Hong Kong. After rating thousands of charities, our system is highly automated. We are ready to expand and replicate the product to other countries with no charity ratings such as Singapore and China.

Currently, only the super-rich can afford the time, money and energy to operate an office for managing charitable fund. Thus, we are going to develop a personal charity fund management tool.  Just like bringing professional computer to a personal computer, iDonate will bring the professional charitable fund management to personal charitable fund management.

We target to serve people from all countries.  Other than charities in Hong Kong, we plan to partner with other organizations such as GoodWill Bank in China, Charity Navigator in the U.S., which have the financial details of local charities. In the U.S., Fundly which matches donors with charity campaign, has raised over USD200m since 2009.

How is it like to work on iDonate as the sole founder and why did you not look for a partner like most startups usually do?

I just did not wait till I have all resources to start my venture.  I’d love to have a co-founder.  Being the sole founder, the upside is the quick decision making and having things move quickly.  The downside is that I would have to take care of all stuff and this can be quite distracting sometimes.

I’m blessed to have very good mentors with startup experiences to provide me with guidance and advices along the way.  Else, the path of being a sole founder would be a lot more challenging.

What would you mainly be looking for at Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace?

We are currently raising funds to develop the personal charitable fund management platform.  Besides that, we’d also love to cooperate with other organizations and replicate the models.  We are looking for both investments and partnerships in Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace.

In the future, we are going to be a virtual personal charitable fund manager.

iDonate will be exhibiting at Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace. The team pitched their product at the Taiwan Satellite in April.

Launch a startup in 54 hours – that’s the premise of the upcoming 2nd Startup Weekend Hong Kong that’s taking place May 18 to 20, 2012 at the M-Lab InnoCentre in Kowloon Tong.

If you’re not familiar with Startup Weekends, it’s a conference- and workshop-type event where a creative and highly motivated bunch of people get together for 54 hours to come up with great startup ideas. These events are open to any innovative mind – over the weekend, developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts can get together to share ideas, form teams, build products and pitch it to a panel of judges. First started in July of 2007 in Boulder, Colorado, the movement has since spread across the world. Hell, there’s even a book on it!

The winner of Startup Weekend Hong Kong will receive a free booth and tickets to attend the coming Startup Asia Jakarta in June to meet with investors and showcase their winning product.

You can register for the event here.

Oh, and if you think no good ideas can come out of the tiny island of Hong Kong, you couldn’t be more wrong – the first winning team of Startup Weekend Hong Kong, AfterShip, beat 50 other teams from all over world and became the ultimate winner of the 2011 Global Startup Battle.

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

A fresh snapshot of Asia’s social media landscape reveals which service dominates in each country – and it’s especially good news for Facebook, which has added more than 20 million users across Asia in the past six months.

The infographic and its stats were put together by the Singapore-based branding and PR agency WeAreSocial. It points out that Facebook now has more than 192 million users across the 24 main Asian wired nations.

The only countries that prefer a different social network are China (where Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QZone dominates), Vietnam (Zing), South Korea (CyWorld), and Japan (Twitter). In the latter country, Japanese social network Mixi has been struggling and is now getting swamped by both Facebook and Twitter.

In China, Tencent’s Qzone looks monstrously huge, but its user numbers have dropped by five million since we last checked on the Asian social media scene last year. That squeeze will have been caused by increasingly popular microblogs (weibo), such as those from Sina and Tencent itself.

Here’s the current view across the region, with the newest site-reported stats that are available for each country (click to enlarge):

Check out which social networks are the most popular in each nation in Asia (May 2012) - Click to enlarge.

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

The weekend is just around the corner. And if you need a fun app to entertain yourself, try Brain Lab 2, a quiz-like IQ game developed by Hong Kong-based startup Asia App Limited. I believe many of you might have tried the first version of Brain Lab before. I certainly did but can’t recall whether it was on Facebook or on the iPhone.

Anyway, the game is basically a series of quizzes that will test your right and left brain IQ. It sounds boring but I would urge you to download and try it yourself. To a certain extent, the app does make me feel stupid. So much so that I’m almost compelled to take the quiz over and over again to better my own high score!

The app is now ranked third on the iTunes paid ranking list with very good ratings from gamers. That said, the app has “invited” users to rate five stars before they can unlock the practice session (thankfully, I believe it still unlocks regardless of rating though). For $0.99, this app brings much fun. It’s worth the download.

This obviously isn't a good score!

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Mobile ad platform InMobi has been busy these past few days crunching ad impressions stats from across Asia, giving us insights into growing smartphone usage in various countries. Now it’s Hong Kong’s turn, where mobile advertising grew 656 percent from Q4 2010 to the same period at the end of 2011. But the picture in Hong Kong is a bleak one for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), whose iOS presence in the Chinese SAR fell 16.1 percent; in contrast, Android seemed to grow by a staggering 36.8 percent, and is now the dominant mobile OS in Hong Kong by some margin.

Smartphones as a whole now account for 80 percent of all of InMobi’s observed advertising impressions, squeezing down features-phones – or “advanced phones” as the company calls them – from 38 percent at the end of 2010 down to just 20 percent at the end of 2011.

It’s all in interesting contrast to InMobi’s stats for Vietnam, which we looked at last week – but of course, Hong Kong is a technologically much more advanced market.

There’s also good news for Samsung (005930:KS) in there, as it now has the first- and third-most popular phone in Hong Kong. Here’s the full infographic, which you can click to enlarge: