Photo: Google Images

The VC landscape varies significantly across the different ‘Valleys of the East”, the Silicon Valley type areas that have started to develop across Asia.  Shaped by their respective economy, culture, business climate, market dynamics and opportunities, the startups also tend to have a different focus. Let’s explore how some of these are tapping into opportunities presented by their local market dynamics.

India – IT, BPO, and the skill gap

India is an emerging economy with specific dynamics and challenges that are caused by the mere size of the country and its population. The fast growth of the IT and Outsourcing industry has driven the requirement for “Learned” manpower. There is a massive gap between high-skilled jobs and low-skilled labor, and some people believe that this could adversely impact India’s economic growth.

Enter Classle, a startup that provides an online social learning platform. Build on the Amazon Web Services cloud, Classle offers online Academics, Projects, Quizzes, and more, all backed by an analytics engine that creates personal profiles and scorecards. This enables students to experience a social and fun way to learn and make their talent visible to employers. For employers in the IT and Outsourcing industry, it offers them a way to identify and hire talent faster and easier, with less risk as they have access to in-depth profiles & analytics on the candidates. Classle is a great example of a company that is born out of the needs of the local market, but could grow to address similar challenges in other emerging economies.

Singapore – high-end manufacturing

Singapore has developed incredibly fast in the last 40 years and now combines a high GDP with steady growth. Its economy leverages their location and port to be a main trading and financial hub. The country has also developed its high-end manufacturing industry, which helped it to become a prime location in the chip industry. When designing chips, a large part of the time and costs are actually spend on hardware and software to run simulations.

Plunify recognized this problem and built a smart platform for ‘Cloud-accelerated Chip Design’. On top of Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure, they built algorithms and an integration layer around different software tools for various stages of the chip design process. Altogether, this delivers a platform that drastically reduces the cost of the chip design process, while significantly accelerating the time to market. As such, they are potentially playing a key role in the growth and modernization of the chip industry in Singapore.

China – powerhouse of game developers

China is not just growing fast as an economic power-house; it also grows fast as a tech-savvy, connected society, with a very large and active community of engineers and developers. Many of these are based in the Zhongguancun area in Beijing (see my previous post) and focus on developing social games.

A great example of a successful social game developer in China is FunPlus Game, a leading social gaming company that currently ranks as one of the Top 7 game developers on Facebook with over 3 million daily active users (DAU).  In Europe, they are the top game developer on the leading social networks and the Netherlands and Germany and their farming game is the number one game in the Arabic version of Facebook. FunPlus games runs on AWS. “With our social game growing from 1 million to 3 million in 3 months, we can spin out more than 300 servers quickly, only managed by 1 engineer”, says Yitao Guan, CTO of FunPlus Game. His company continues to develop great games, leading to fast growth across the world.

All three companies are examples of innovation, entrepreneurship, and an ability to spot opportunities presented by local market dynamics. And these are just 3 of many…

About Pieter Kemps

Pieter works for Amazon Web Services and interacts closely with leading VC’s and fast growing tech startups in Asia. He is passionate about startups that combine product innovation with strong business model economics. Amazon Web Services is a Supporting Sponsor at Echelon 2012.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the personal thoughts of Pieter Kemps and do not reflect the views of his employer or their associates.

I interviewed the founder of India-based FusionCharts, Pallav Nadhani, about a year ago. It was great fun documenting his story. As we noted then, story of FusionCharts started when he was age 17. He found charts boring and thought they could be made sexier and more interactive.

He founded FusionCharts in 2002 and since then, the product has been used by some big names in the web world, including Google (Google Docs), LinkedIn, and Weather.com. FusionCharts also proudly claims that it is powering over one billion charts each month globally. It is also a highly profitable business, I hear. All this was achieved without any funding. FusionCharts bootstrapped its way to success, and that kind of success is hard to come by these days.

One billion charts is no small feat. Here at Tech in Asia, our team is fans of charts made from Google Docs. You can see them embedded on our site from time to time. But FusionCharts is more than just charts on Google Docs. It could also be used for customized reports and dashboards for businesses. To make it easier for folks to learn more about FusionCharts, Nadhani and his team have recently launched a beginners guide for the service. Sanket Nadhani, the lead author of the book told me:

Packt, famous for its practical guides in the web dev space (especially on niche technologies) was looking for authors to write a book on FusionCharts on Twitter and we were like – hey, it’s our book and we could do a decent job of it. A couple of emails and phone calls later, we decided to make it the official guide to FusionCharts.

You can find out more info about the book here.

FushionCharts looks to be moving quickly with big plans. It plans to launch Collabion, a charting solution exclusively for SharePoint by the end of this quarter. It is also working on Oomfo, a charting plugin exclusively for PowerPoint. By October this year, FusionCharts will officially be a ten-year old company. We certainly think it has been pretty productive so far!

Photo: Google Images

It is hard to find an industry that is as highly centralized as the Venture Capital industry: centralized in the US, and specifically in one street in Silicon Valley: Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. However, this is gradually changing as the VC industry is developing fast in many sometimes unexpected places. You might call them ‘Valleys of the East’: Silicon Valley type areas that are emerging across Asia Pacific and present a huge opportunity for technology innovation and investments:

Fortitude Valley and the Silicon Beach initiative in Australia Bandung’s developers that feed the startups in Jakarta, Indonesia Silicon Gulf around Davao City, and the outskirts of Makati & Manila in the Philippines Bangalore Valley in India Zhongguancun in Haidan district, Beijing, often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.

The largest of these are obviously in India and China. Bangalore Valley is a vibrant hub of innovation and startups, which has grown out of the many companies that specialize in R&D, electronics, software, and BPO. During the dotcom boom, Bangalore’s IT industry saw the emergence of many local and global IT companies, which helped to lay the foundation for the tech eco-system of universities, R&D centers, developers, and component suppliers.

Photo: Google Images

Like Bangalore, Zhongguancun started out a hub for electronics and IT and was referred to as ‘electronics avenue’ in the 1980’s. The area was labeled “Beijing High-Technology Industry Development Experimental Zone” in 1988 by the Chinese government. Different than the more organic process that led to the emergence of Bangalore Valley, the support of the government has helped to build the eco-system that led to the boom in developers, innovation, and tech startups in this area.

The more mature Valleys of the East have also developed a booming VC industry, and it is interesting to see how these differ from each other and from the more established VC sector in the US:

In terms of the size of VC market, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) in the US stated that $22B was invested in the US in 2010, while $12.3B was raised by VC funds. For the same hear, Zero2IPO Research Center shows very different numbers for China: $5.4B was invested and $11.2B was raised. Hence, the amounts of money raised are quite similar but the value of actual investments in China is only about 25% of those in the US.

Another interesting difference is the risk profile of the various markets. This is closely related to the size of Early Stage investments, i.e. Seed Series A. The NVCA has calculated that the dollar value of early stage investments in the US is about 32%. In China, this is a mere 6% according to Zero2IPO.

You can see how these markets differ significantly across various key variables, but tend to align well to their local markets, which in turn vary by orientation, culture, and industry focus. Like the VC’s, the startups differ significantly across the various regions. More on that later.

About Pieter Kemps

Pieter works for Amazon Web Services and interacts closely with leading VC’s and fast growing tech startups in Asia. He is passionate about startups that combine product innovation with strong business model economics. Amazon Web Services is a Supporting Sponsor at Echelon 2012,

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the personal thoughts of Pieter Kemps and do not reflect the views of his employer or their associates.

A report last year from Nielsen India showed that there was a seismic shift happening in the way the country’s smartphone users were spending their time overall, with more time spent in activities like browsing, using apps, or mobile gaming. And now the folks over at Nielsen have a further breakdown into how men and women in India use their smartphones differently.

The research firm’s Informate Mobile Insights gives an interesting overview of smartphone activity in the country according to gender [1]. Here are some of the more interesting takeaways:

Men spend 50 percent more time browsing the web than women. Women spend more time on calls (33 percent more) and instant messaging apps (four times more) than men. Men install more apps and use Google maps more than women.

It would be interesting to see how men and women vary on a global scale, because I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some global trends like these as well. You can check out the graphics below, or see Nielsen’s original post for more information.

Nielsen says that its Informate Mobile Insights uses opt-in smartphone panels to generate these reports.

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]

CloudyRec pitching at Singapore Satellite. Photo: Microsoft

Together with the Microsoft Campfire and Imagine Cup, the Singapore Satellite showcased 14 startups from Singapore, Malaysia and India.

14 startups pitched at the Singapore Satellites, which was held together with with Microsoft Campfire. The strong infrastructure of the Singaporean startup community clearly showed in the maturity of the startup pitches and their products. The Judges’ Choice went to clear winner Perx, a customer loyalty and engagement platform. The startup, backed by solid investors such as Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, has already signed on merchants, such as Subway Dunkin Donuts, and is currently expanding their user base.

TinyTrunk's YongFook pitching at Singapore Satellite 2012. Photo: Microsoft

Some other notable startups at the Singapore Satellite were Malaysian teams, Flexiroam and XpressCover. Flexiroam, which is a service that allows travelers to roam at an affordable price, showcased their newly launch iOS app and further expansion plans. XpressCover, a business-to-business insurance services for couriers, stemmed from a founding team well-versed in the insurance industry. Both startups demonstrated strong user traction. View our pre-Singapore Satellite post for the full list of the 14 pitching startups.

Perx winning the Judges' Choice at Singapore Satellite 2012. Photo: Microsoft

Hastings Singh, Managing Director, RIM South Asia (Photo: Stratcom)

At the press conference of RIM’s  latest release of BlackBerry Curve 9220 in Jakarta on April 25, RIM Managing Director for South Asia, Hasting Singh claimed that BlackBerry is the number one smart phone brand in Indonesia, accounting for 12 million out of around 77 million users worldwide. This figure was cited from surveys conducted by two market research firms: Australian research company, Roy Morgan Research and GfK Group.

Roy Morgan reported that in the third quarter last year, BlackBerry delivered the highest level of customer experience when compared with other devices. Market research company, GfK Group which reported the device recorded the most selling smart phone in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

The BlackBerry Curve 9220 is by far the company’s most affordable BlackBerry 7 OS smart phone offered for Indonesians, following last week’s launch in India. Slightly different with India where pool of popular apps – utilities, games and others – are freely available for download until a period of time.

BlackBerry Curve 9220′s features

The phone is built with a 2.44 inch display screen, 800MHz processor, 512MB RAM, dedicated BBM key and a pre-installed set of the most social apps: Facebook, Twitter and Social Feeds. With a longer lasting battery life, users can have up to 7 hours of talk time or 28 hours of music playback. A downside of the phone is that it comes without 3G but, users can connect to the internet with the phone’s built-in Wi-Fi.

Available in the market starting from April 25 with a starting price of IDR 1.99 million (US$ 216), BB fans can start grabbing them from retail stores distributed by PT (Teletama Artha Mandiri, PT. Selular Shop and PT. Comtech Selular). “With the arrival of BlackBerry Davis and announcement of Armstrong really soon, Gemini’s price will drop, from IDR 1.899 million (about US$ 206) into USD 1.599 million (US$ 174),” said Djatmiko Wardoyo, Global Teleshop President Director.

With low-cost Android powered devices like Huawei and ZTE jumping into the African and Asian bandwagon, the BlackBerry maker is facing stiff competition in emerging markets such as Middle East, South Africa and South America. In the case of Indonesia, the situation is more or less pretty much similar. BlackBerry in the country is head-to-head with uprising Android and staggering iPhone.

Despite all the negative views on BlackBerry, Indonesia  (still) holds one of the Waterloo-based company’s biggest share of wallet because the demand keeps growing. “We love the market here, it’s something we are going to be focusing through 2012,” Singh added.

Additionally, some of us might have heard of their plans to open around 4,000 outlets across Indonesia by February next year (as announced at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona last month). This includes dedicated stores, store-in-stores and kiosks. All of a sudden, Indonesia is designated as a stepping stone for expanding in the Southeast Asia region.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has announced today, in cooperation with Lava International, that the XOLO X900 will go on sale on April 23 in India. This will mark the first time that Intel, the maker of processors for most PCs, will see find its way inside a smartphone.

Overall the specs are, well, ok. There’s a 4.03-inch LCD screen (1024 x 600), an 8-megapixel camera, 1 gigabyte of RAM, and 16 gigabytes of onboard storage. It will run on Android Gingerbread, with an ICS upgrade to come later.

The centerpiece however, is Intel’s 1.6 GHz Atom Z2460 processor, which brings with it the promise of high-speed performance and better multi-taskings, as you can see in the demo video below. Interestingly, the camera can shoot in bursts of 10 shots in less than a second, and I’m looking forward to seeing if any new innovative photo apps will spring from such a feature.

As for battery life, Intel says confidently that it is as good or better than current market alternatives, claiming up to five hours for 3G browsing, 45 hours of audio, and eight hours of talk time.

The device will cost INR 22,000 (or about $425), available for purchase first from Croma and Xolo.in, with other retailers to follow in May. Bloomberg has a hands on video where the Xolo looks very impressive indeed. Check it out for yourself, and let us know what you think.

Mobile social network mig33 is betting big on emerging markets still using feature and/or Android-based phones. Previously, we learned that it has partnered with 12 Asian handset brands in Indonesia and India.

Today, mig33 announced partnerships with three more handset makers in India — G’Five, Intex, and Zen. According to the statement, G’Five is the third largest handset maker in India, falling just behind Nokia and Samsung. Though big in India, G’Five is actually a China-based company.

Mig33 is perhaps the largest mobile social network focusing on feature phones. It is becoming a “must have” app for feature phone makers looking to add social networking and gaming fun on their phones. It makes the phone more compelling to have the mig33 app on it. Feature phones that missed out might not be as attractive to users. But that is assuming that mig33 has enough active users to create such a demand. The mig33 effect will just get greater as more phones (with mig33 preloaded) are sold to more users.

Mig33 now has 55 million registered users. It also claims to have 300,000 daily active users on its new miniblog service, a service that works much like Sina Weibo. Besides social networking functions, mig33 also hosts games built by third party developers. It saw over 300 billion messages and over 185 million virtual gifts sent globally in 2011.

Right now across Asia, 63 percent of mobile telcos have rolled out 4G LTE services, or are now conducting trials or have firm plans. That’s the finding of ABI Research in a new paper on the infrastructure for the next-gen mobile data network that will eventually supersede 3G.

Of course, trials and plans do not help consumers stream any movies at blazing web speeds, so the reality is that 4G is fully deployed in very few areas of the Asia-Pacific region – mainly in Japan and South Korea. Indeed, ABI notes:

Out of 110 networks, 10 operators (9 percent) have commercial 4G LTE networks up and running. Another 58 (53 percent) either have specific plans to roll out LTE or are conducting trials.

That’s some way behind the deployment rates among North American and European carriers. Jake Saunders, ABI’s vice president of forecasting, added:

We estimate total Asia-Pacific mobile capital expenditure to reach US$53.3 billion by the end of 2012. 62 percent is still very much earmarked for radio access network deployment. Other key investment areas include EPC and gateway upgrades to the core network at 9 percent, as well as improving in-building wireless coverage into dense urban centers at 5.7 percent.

In Japan, we recently reported that NTT Docomo has two million LTE subscribers; whilst in neighboring South Korea, SK Telecom paid nearly a billion dollars for a key LTE spectrum last year, and is now busy wooing consumers with smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S II LTE, hoping to lure people away from 3G.

China, meanwhile, has said that 4G can wait another two to three years for an initial roll-out while the nation concentrates on strengthening its 3G infrastructure. China will use the LTE-TDD standard that Apple will reportedly support. Trials are indeed underway, but are limited in scope even within the select half dozen cities where it’s being tested.

We’ve not seen so much action out of India, so thankfully ABI has been keeping its eyes peeled there:

Heavy RAN [LTE-RAN, a different network standard] investment has been taking place in India. A number of operators are jockeying for position in a very competitive marketplace. On April 10, Bharti Airtel became the first operator to launch 4G LTE services in India, in Kolkata. Bharti Airtel hopes to launch 4G services in Bangalore before June 2012. Equipment spend is not just occurring in 4G. The Indian operator, Idea, has continued to roll out 2,270 2G cell sites and 1,176 3G cell sites in the past year.

Singapore will allocate airwaves for 4G next year, says Reuters, but an island-wide rollout is not expected until 2016.

[Source: ABI Research]