Where do you head to to find good recommendations for these:

Hotel and Flights? Tripadvisor.

Food? hungrygowhere (Singapore)

And what about EVERYTHING? Here’s one that we all know– Yelp.

Taiwan startup, Citydomo is creating a Yelp-like site for users to read and write reviews on everything from food, hotels, night clubs to even plastic surgery! In exchange for writing reviews, users gain Domo dollars and stand a chance to win prizes.

e27 caught up with Co-founder, Kevin Lin to find out more about Citydomo.

What is the idea behind Citydomo?

Citydomo wants to build a company that can send local businesses themselves viral.

Citydomo has two inspirations. We would like to provide the education, support, and nurturing necessary for companies to craft and manage the entire sales life cycle online, from exposure and sales, to post-sale branding. Secondly, we would like to make it fun to promote the businesses that you love by offering prizes to users who spreads the word through Facebook, Twitter, write reviews, upload business photos, attend events, make purchases…etc from Citydomo’s business partners. With good content, good tracking, and incentives to spread the message, we plan to send our business partners viral.

Your team is mostly made up of the friends you made while at Duke. How has the overseas experience contributed to your entrepreneurship endeavor?

At Duke MBA, we had a chance to learn from a vast array of business people around the world. From spice market vendors in Dubai to the CEO of the second largest mining company in the world, the most important lessons we learned from these people was to listen to our customers. We found out that we ourselves don’t have to have all the answers. If we listen to our end users and craft our product around their wants, needs, desires and ambitions, we will fill the gap that exist in the market.

From a logistics points of view, Joe and Kevin learned to collaborate remotely as a team from anywhere in the world. This has played out well as Joseph is currently stationed in Austria while Kevin is on the ground in Taiwan. Even with thousands of miles between them, they are able to create synergies that even in-person teams would envy.

The Citydomo team. Photo: Citydomo

How is the traction like for Citydomo and what are some of the feedback you have received from users so far?

From a user’s perspective, Citydomo is growing on track with our models. Our gamification system, as we predicted, has accelerated our growth about three fold as users sign on and begin earning domo $ and promoting businesses with the goal of winning great prizes they love. We have already outgrown our first hosting solution and just this past weekend we moved into the Amazon Cloud hosted in Singapore.

Citydomo's office. Photo: Citydomo

From a business partner’s perspective, we are moving along the learning curve. We knew going into this that working with small and medium sized businesses in Taiwan required a customized plan. We could not simple take a business idea from North America and drop it down in Taiwan – like Google/Yahoo tried – because it would fail. We see our progression down this learning curve as a competitive advantage. Once we have tailored our business partner education, sales, sales support and logistics programs we will have a year to a year and a half of operational protection from other competitors.

The main thing our business partners are telling us is that they want to see proof that their campaigns are working and that they did not feel a fixed monthly rate was justifiable. Citydomo responded to these observations by launching a pay-per-performance scheme based on the amount of domo $ generated around a business and by expanding our reporting, tracking, and branding features of the website and corresponding concierge services. (Concierge is what Citydomo calls its business development staff because they aren’t just selling the site to our clients, they are helping to educate the businesses on our tools and mold the businesses image online)

What are some of Citydomo’s plans ahead?

Citydomo is pushing hard to continue partnering with businesses around the Taipei area. To date we have 60 business partners and we would like to expand that to 350 by the end of the year.

Our next big push of features will be to support the businesses’ needs. These include the ability to interact with leads, detailed reporting capabilities, and additional tools to manage and sculpt their brand on Citydomo.com. Our other big initiative will be to begin releasing the mobile versions of Citydomo that will allow users to write reviews, learn about businesses and their events and specials, and earn domo $ while on the go.

Citydomo's Co-founders, Kevin and Joe. Photo: Citydomo

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

We are mainly looking for exposure through the Echelon 2012 market place. This is our first big coming out to the world and we would like everyone to know about the great work our staff is doing on the ground in Taipei, building up the Citydomo brand and product.

While we are opening lines of communication with potential investors in Taiwan, we are looking forward to meet some other international investors in the event who are interested in our product and believe in Citydomo’s business model.

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

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]

Having just completed the six regional Satellites, here’s a recap of what went on at the Taiwan Satellite.

The Taiwan Satellite was a half day event  held on 24 April 2012 at the Taipei International Convention Centre. The event kicked off with an opening by e27, followed by a series of back-to-back keynote sessions by a mix of speakers made up of entrepreneurs, investors and BlackBerry representative.

The pitching session featuring 14 startups from Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong was the main highlight of the event. To select the the best startups to exhibit and pitch at the main event, Echelon 2012 (on 11 & 12 June 2012), a panel of judges made up of a mix of key people from the Singapore and Taiwan tech scene were present: Jit Siong Koh (e27, Co-founder), Mark Hsu (Partner, TMI Holding), Alan Wong (Application Development Specialist, Research In Motion), Jamie Lin (Founder of AppWorks) and Izero Lee (COO, KKBOX Inc.)

Quote from Mark Hsu during his speech at the Taiwan Satellite

Jamie Lin tweets at Taiwan Satellite

In the end, it was Ragic Builder, a flexible business application for companies to create web applications that took home the Judges’ Choice award. Unlike the previous four satellites we had, where only one award was given out, a second award by  TMI Holding, Echelon 2012′s Taiwan Satellite Partner, was also given away to the startup they saw most promising. The prize, a four-month incubation program opportunity that provides them with access to the Taiwan, Beijing or US market (depending on the stage that the startup) was presented to Docubank, a cloud computing document management service startup.

Docubank wins TMI Incubation Program at Taiwan Satellite

For more information on the pitching startups at the Taiwan Satellite, read our previous article here.

Check out pictures from our Taiwan Satellite, courtesy of TMI Holding, here!

The folks over at mobile advertising network InMobi have conducted a survey [1] into how people in Taiwan are using mobile devices, and how their habits are changing. Much like we saw with the company’s research into the mobile market in Vietnam, mobile phones are gradually supplanting other forms of media to become one of the most promising advertising platforms.

According to InMobi, the average mobile web user in Taiwan consumes six hours of media per day, and mobile accounts for 98 minutes (27 percent) of that total. This is just behind PCs (122 minutes), but ahead of television (88 minutes). Most of this media consumption comes during times when they are commuting or while lying in bed.

InMobi’s regional director and general manager for southeast Asia explained:

We see continued growth in mobile usage in Taiwan in the coming year, largely driven by social media and entertainment. Our research also shows that 79 percent of mobile web users plan to conduct mobile commerce over the next 12 months, a 31 percent increase from where we are today. With its proven influence on the consumer purchase cycle, mobile is now a vital part of marketing strategies for leading brands in the country.

You can check out InMobi’s informative graphic below, which illustrates most of their key findings for the mobile market in Taiwan.

The sample size for their survey was 942 mobile users.

Piktochart pitching at the Vietnam Satellite 2012

With 2 more Satellites to go, the Taiwan Satellite will see 14 startups pitch their products on 24 April.

e27 has just passed the halfway mark for the 6 Satellites, the regional search for some of Asia’s most promising startups. Next up, the Taiwan Satellite in Taipei on 24 April. The event will see keynote presentations from Sanjay Shivkumar of Replaid, Mark Hsu from TMI, Alan Wong from Research In Motion and Federico Folcia of Roomorama. View the full agenda here.

The event details are as follows:

Date: 24 April, 2012 (Tuesday)

Time: 12.00pm – 6.00pm

Venue: Taipei International Convention Center , No. 1?, Section 5, Xìnyì Road, Sinyi District, Taipei City, Taiwan 110, Taiwan

Online registration for the free Taiwan Satellite can be done here.

The Taiwan Satellite will see 14 startups from Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong pitch their products. The startups, in pitching order are:

WhatsTheNumber – a Yellow Pages app for smartphone users HuliHealth – a medical service search and appointment-booking platform Busification – a SaaS project management application for business managers Justaple – a social curation service iDonate – a social goods platform and mobile app with charity ratings Citydomo – a business review and promotional website iBeengo Trip Planner – an online interactive travel planner Interactive Rehabilitation System – An interactive rehabilitation system based on the Kinect Docubank – a cloud computing document management service Snapshock – a photo sharing platform Recood – an Instagram-like video recording application Ragic Builder – a flexible business application for companies to create web apps I-Influence – a cloud-based social influence and advocacy marketing platform LuxJoy – a high-end e-commerce website

Join us at the Taiwan Satellite to witness some of the most promising startups pitch. There will be a lucky draw sponsored by BlackBerry for the attendees.

Cubie Messenger, an IM launched by a Taiwan startup Gamelet, has over 200,000 downloads since their launch one month ago.

Following the huge success of Draw Something, another app which was just launched recently also enjoyed a huge user adoption rate. A product of Gamelet based in Taiwan, Cubie Messenger is a new messaging app like Whatsapp or LINE on the iPhone and Android, and has seen an impressive 200,000 downloads (source in Chinese) within their first month of launch.

So what is the key with Cubie Messenger? Cubie Messenger is Whatsapp with Draw Something built into it, allowing you to draw something funny while chatting. Other than the in app drawing feature with comes with eight drawing colors, Cubie also offers a comprehensive range of features such as animated stickers and emoticons, voice messages, as well as allowing multimedia file sharing. There are also no in app advertisements and the chat can support a group chat of up to 100 users. Wow.

One thing which surprised me with Cubie Messenger is that, it is not integrated with existing social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter yet, or even with the various social networking services which are popular among Chinese such as Weibo or RenRen. With social integration, it might help fuel the virality of the app and enhancing social sharing. Unlike Whatsapp, Cubie Messenger is not integrated into your address book and the app requires your permission to have access to them. This actually created a friction for me to use Cubie Messenger. Point to not on this for the team looking to give the usability of this app a more organic feel.

Photo: Cubie

That said however, Cubie is now ranked No.1 on the Appstore’s Social Networking category in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. The app is available for download on both iPhone and Android.

Perhaps another feature which I missed out was that, not only can you draw something with your users, you can also edit them and enhance the drawings. Sounds fun! Unfortunately, I have yet to try it out because noone around me are using Cubie yet. So, will you Cubie me?

The travel industry is definitely the next industry that is set to disrupt, if not already. The limelight on the success of companies like Airbnb which has changed the way vacation rental industry was done has now led to more and more startups innovating the travel industry. Nearer to home, Roomorama, which has a base in Singapore, is one such startup, and has recently merged with Lofty, a similar vacation renting startup based in the states.

Photo: Lofty

According to TechCrunch, backing this merger is a $2.1 million seed round from names that are already connected to the online travel market, including Jose Marin (investor in Russian travel site HipWay and hotel booking site GuestMob), PROfounders Capital, Lerer Media Ventures, and Thrive Capital Partners.

Mergers are good. Not only does both companies leverage on each other’s resources to overcome its limitation, it would also result in having a wider reach, thus standing a higher chance to build a long lasting company. With more and more startups sprouting out everyday, startups generally have a tough time making it big. For every startup that made it, there must be hundreds more that are shut down. Instead of fighting against one another for the fixed amount of market share, which might end up causing more harm, in my opinion, it is definitely wise to see how startups can help one another if they complement each other.

For Roomorama and Lofty, both focus on the mid-range to high-end travel market, and since Roomorama had the customers but lacked inventory; and Lofty had inventory but not enough customers to fill it, the merger made sense. Adding on to the factor of merger between the two is the complementary fit geographically: Roomorama is based in Singapore and does a lot of business in Asia, while Grinda says that a full third of Lofty’s business is in the U.S. with another third in Europe.

A while back we did an interview with the cofounder of Roomorama, Federico Folcia to find out about their expansion plans to Asia. Federico will also be speaking at our Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan Echelon Satellite event.

Research in Motion: Echelon 2012's Premier Sponsor.

We recently partnered with Research in Motion (RIM), who came on board as one of Echelon 2012′s Premier Sponsor.

As part of the partnership, RIM supported this initiative with BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets and BlackBerry® smartphones as prizes for Startup Marketplace winning team and Satellite participants. Winners will also receive free membership into the BlackBerry Alliance Program, which includes technical and marketing benefits.

RIM is a global leader in wireless innovation, revolutionized the mobile industry with the introduction of the BlackBerry® solution in 1999.

Widely known by their BlackBerry product line, which includes the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, the award-winning BlackBerry smartphone portfolio, software for businesses and accessories, its products and services are used by millions of customers around the world to stay connected to the people and content that matter most throughout their day.

Echelon 2012

“We are very pleased to have RIM on board as Echelon 2012′s Premier Sponsor. With RIM’s expertise, penetration and involvement in the South East Asia market, we believe the collaboration will value add to the Asian startup community in terms of helping the startups in this region to grow and scale in the right direction,” said Mr Mohan Belani, Director of e27.

Representatives from RIM will also be speaking and judging at some of the Echelon 2012′s upcoming Satellites. Click on the individual portraits below to read the speaker’s full biodata.

A Taiwanese-made messaging app looks set to cash in on the craze for doodling that was stirred up by the OMGpop/Zynga game Draw Something. The app, LiiHo Handwriting Messenger, is free and out now for iPad, and has an English and Chinese interface. But anyone in the world can use it in any language since it’s all about chatting with your friends using handwriting, drawing, and even scribbling on photos.

Actually, the LiiHo app predates Draw Something by a whole six months, having launched back in August of last year.

Despite being way ahead of the zeitgeist in doodling apps, LiiHo doesn’t seem to have quite taken off yet – with only 27 ‘likes’ on Facebook. But this week it’s finally getting some coverage in local media in Taiwan. To find out more, we talked to David Lai, the marketing manager at LinkTel, the startup behind the app. He explains how they came up with the idea:

We simply want iPad users to skip the inconvenience of typing and switching keyboards for different languages, and regain the fun of conversation by handwriting and drawing.

It’s a nice example of the very bilingual tendencies of Taiwanese youngsters – using a mix of Chinese and English – bringing about a new twist in the familiar instant-messaging (IM) genre. It’s also a challenger to group messaging apps like WhatsApp or Line, even though it doesn’t require being tied to a phone number and there isn’t yet a version for iPhone. LiiHo users can add friends and chat with them either via their iOS Contacts app, username, or by logging-in with Facebook.

Once you’ve got some IM buddies on board, you can have fun doing three main things:

Make handwritten message using your fingertip in the large white box (which shows as a preview on the yellow Post-It note area). Graffiti and scribble all over photos. Create full-size doodles using four size and colours of digital markers.

As for LinkTel as a startup, David says that it currently has capital of NT$125 million ($4.24 million), although it’s not divulged if that involves some seed funding. For now, he adds, they are “focusing on how to expend the user base, monetization is not a high priority.”

See more screenshots on the LiiHo homepage, or go straight to iTunes to download the LiiHo iPad app.

On a semi-related note: For a more business-minded approach to handwriting apps, check out the video demo of the Japanese-made 7notes app that we filmed last year.

Photo: ithome.com.tw

Internet search giant Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) today announced that it has started building a new data center in Changhua County in Taiwan, and has plans for limited testing and bringing it online in the second half of 2013.

This will be the third data center for Google in Asia, as it’s also working on two others which have yet to be completed. Those two centers in Singapore and Hong Kong are both scheduled to be completed in early 2013. But according to Google, the Taiwan data center will “be the first in [its] fleet to save energy through a nighttime cooling and thermal energy storage system.”

Google will also be hiring locally, and has a few positions listed on its website relating to the new data center.

The investment in this Taiwan facility is more than $300 million, part of more than $700 million that the company is spending in the region. It’s all part of Google’s efforts to ensure that users in the region can access its services quickly and reliably.

Of course, the majority of Asia’s internet users are from China — specifically 50.5 percent of them according to the most recent figures from Internet World Stats. Google is still operating in China, but navigates difficult waters with its Chinese search service now redirecting to its Hong Kong search.

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[Data in map from Internet World Stats, as of December 2011]