San Francisco-based transportation startup Uber has been sniffing around Jakarta as of late, opening job vacancies for both drivers and permanent staff along the way. While there’s not yet an official launch announcement, Uber Jakarta’s Twitter account tweeted that the service has chauffeured a couple of Indonesian celebrities around the capital city.

The two celebrities are Sandiaga Uno, one of Indonesia’s richest men, and Whulandari Herman, the winner of the Puteri Indonesia 2013 beauty pageant. The whole trip – which happened yesterday – is a good indication that Uber will officially launch in Jakarta very soon. This is similar to what happened in other cities like Beijing and Manila, where Uber launches were preceded by secret celebrity rides around town.

As explained during recent events in Jakarta, the Uber team will do a soft launch in the coming weeks where secret Uber cars will drive around the city for some time. Uber will do a high-profile launch after recruiting a three-man team for the country.

As indicated on Uber’s driver recruitment page in Jakarta, Uber’s first product offering for Indonesia would most likely be UberBlack. It offers a sedan or crossover SUV that can fit four people, or a full-sized SUV that can fit up to six people.

Uber recently launched in Bangkok, Beijing, and Manila.

Anonymous social apps like Whisper and Secret have blown up in the US lately, attracting media attention for their risque content and foaming valuations. In particular, Secret earned a reputation as the unofficial tabloid for the Silicon Valley startup community, as entrepreneurs and impostors alike share the latest industry gossip without fear of getting ratted out. Among other high-profile incidents, news of a female employee’s departure from Github amidst an alleged sexual harassment incident first broke on the app, as did information regarding the latest venture from former Square and Paypal exec Keith Rabois.

While Secret’s traction in the Valley might have come about unintentionally, one Chinese company is trying to replicate its success in the west by borrowing from the basic concept and placing it directly in a workplace context. The result – Tusi (or “toast” in English), an app that’s already broadcasting some dark secrets from big-name Chinese companies.

We’ve previously covered two Chinese apps that “drew inspiration from” Secret and Whisper. But while those apps merely imported the anonymous social concept, Tusi arguably improves on Secret.

After downloading the app, users must register for Tusi using either their QQ or Weibo accounts. Afterwards, you’ll be asked to specify the name of the company you work for by entering it in a search field or specifying from a list.

Tusi features a main feed that appears to aggregate recent posts according to popularity, along with theme-specific (office romances, weird coworkers) and company specific feeds.

Posting a rumor works more or less like the same as Secret or Whisper, albeit with an added twist – stickers are mandatory. Along with a few other characters, Tusi’s toast-faced mascot is here to liven up your workplace gossip.

Already, users claiming to work at high-profile Chinese companies like Baidu and Alibaba have sent out posts on Tusi.

It doesn’t look like Tusi imposes any sort of verification check on its users’ identities – this writer registered as a Xiaomi employee.  Implementing these sorts of checks would improve the credibility of the rumors that surface on Tusi, but of course, that might deter people from actually using it to spill the beans.

Perhaps that’s why Dajie, the company behind the app, appears to be downplaying its involvement. While the LinkedIn-esque company created Tusi, there’s no button in Tusi that redirects to the Dajie homepage or mobile app. However, since Tusi is barely a week old, it seems quite likely it will evolve if it proves to be a hit. According to Sina Tech, the company is currently hoping to add more social elements to its core social network for white-collar workers – Tusi likely marks the first step in that process. Dajie claims to have over two million registered users in China, behind LinkedIn’s four million Chinese users.

Apple’s iBeacon technology, which can trigger an action on someone’s phone when they’re in range of an iBeacon, could shake up the retail industry and change the way we interact with stores, brands, and other venues. For now, this Bluetooth-based tech is largely untested and its realistic potential is unknown. But that’s not stopping a number of startups from trying to build something on top of it.

One such startup is Singapore-based Beacon-In. It’s building a service for retailers and brands to reach out to passersby via iBeacons – and the team is also building the hardware to go with it.

Beacon-In co-founder Aditya Haripurkar says that the tech has uses in a number of ways and places, and can prove useful to regular people. For example, Haripurkar explains, an airline could put iBeacons in its plane and upon arriving at the gate the service would ping all phone users on board ⁽¹⁾, on iOS and Android, with useful information about the destination. Of course, it can also be used to push promotions and adverts too, which might prove less welcome. People don’t need to have a specific app installed in order to receive alerts from nearby iBeacons, which is why some analysts say the tech could succeed where other things, like NFC or QR codes, have failed by being too tricky or annoying for most people to grasp.

In the example pictured above, arriving at a Singapore subway station will trigger a notification to check out the official SMRT app.

Haripurkar says that Beacon-In is currently bringing stores and brands on board but declined to say how many have signed up so far. The enterprise-facing startup offers things like analytics, creative services, and consultancy so that its clients can understand the best way to reach more people through iBeacons.

For now, the notification leads only to an image, but browser actions and video-based alerts will be added in later as options for its clients.

Beacon-In will launch a consumer-facing app later this month for iOS – and then Android in July – for regular people who want to find nearby places to eat and shop.

Penang-based rich media mobile ad creator startup, MobileAds (previously known as RichMobileAds) has a received an undisclosed strategic investment from Seattle-headquartered HasOffers. CEO and founder Alvin Koay couldn’t share the exact figure but did say it is a bridge round to its series A. The investment sum is six figures.

Besides its Penang headquarters, MobileAds now has an office in Tokyo and a recent key hire in the US. “We just hired Ron Sheridan as our company’s director of US operations. He was a co-founder of Oversee.net, [a company] once valued at US$1 billion by SAI in 2009,” says Koay. “We will soon have an office in San Francisco”. Today, MobileAds has a team of 14 in Penang, Tokyo, and San Francisco.

The new funding from HasOffers is strategic in the sense that is helps MobileAds enter the US market with much ease. Despite MobileAds being closer to Asia, Koay explains that US “is still one of the world’s biggest digital advertising market.” He also tells Tech in Asia that China will be its next target market. It will also use the fund to develop a “disruptive mobile video advertising solution” both for web and native apps.

See: China spent more on mobile ads than US in Q3 2013

HasOffers, as described on its website, is a “white-labeled software for networks, agencies, or internal media buyers to manage performance advertising programs for online and mobile offers”. It runs MobileAppTracking, a mobile advertising performance analytics. HasOffers is backed by Accel Partners with over 180 employees in six offices across the globe.

MobileAds is HasOffers’ first investment in a startup. HasOffers’s CEO Peter Hamilton believes that “flexible ad creation and serving will play a major role” in the future of the digital advertising industry and was impressed with MobileAds’ solution, calling it the “best white-labeled enterprise-level solution” they have seen. With HasOffers’ investment and also client reach, MobileAds could be under good care.

Prior to this round, the Penang-based startup was the overall winner of the Guardian’s Activate Summit Tech Talent Day in Singapore which won them GBP100,000 (US$168,000) in advertising credits on The Guardian’s media properties. Through the event, it attracted the attention of Professor Serguei Netessine (also an angel investor of Redmart) who then angel invested in MobileAds.

See: The truth about “mobile advertising” in China

MobileAds first pitched at our Startup Asia Singapore 2013’s Arena competition. Despite not winning the Arena pitch battle, the judges and audience were impressed with its solution.

China’s biggest ecommerce company Alibaba will wholly-acquire the country’s biggest mobile browser maker UCWeb, according to a joint announcement made today.

Alibaba will buy all the shares of UCWeb that it does not already own. UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu will become part of Alibaba’s new strategic decision-making committee, and all 3,000 of UCWeb’s employees are now under the Alibaba umbrella as part of the “Ali UC mobile business group” (translation ours). According to UC Web’s Chinese-language PR statement, the new branch will be reponsible for building and developing its mobile browser division, search division, UC’s Jiuyue mobile games platform, its PP app distribution platform, and ebook division. Yu Yongfu said in his Chinese-language statement (translation ours):

Today’s Alibaba Group, with its deep and international integration in a number of verticals including electronics, online finance, cloud computing, big data, entertainment, and logistics, has already far surpassed any other Chinese internet company in scale. When it comes to integrating the internet with other industries, Alibaba has an obvious position to lead. You can say Alibaba is no longer an internet company, it’s a company that transcends the internet.

According to the press release, the deal is the biggest Chinese internet merger in history, exceeding Baidu’s US$1.9 billion acquisition of 91 Wireless in August 2013. Alibaba paid UCWeb mainly with shares and a bit of cash, but the exact amount was not disclosed.

Alibaba has invested in UCWeb twice before, once in 2009 and 2013, and already owned two-thirds of it. The two companies in April teamed up to launch a mobile content search engine dubbed Shenma.

The acquisition is a huge strategic move for Alibaba, which has been trying to extend its reach beyond the Chinese mainland. UCWeb’s mobile browser, UC Browser, has a huge 500 million quarterly active users. It’s the most popular third-party browser in India and also has strong user bases in Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, and even the US. It’s one of the few Chinese internet firms to find huge success outside of its home market.

Viber, a popular desktop and mobile chat app that was acquired by Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten for US$900 million, has announced new user numbers.

It reached 100 million ‘concurrent online users’, defined as the number of users who have an open connection to Viber’s servers at any point of time. It also has over 362 million registered users, up from 280 million in February.

What do these figures mean? Viber is probably the only popular chat app so far that has released concurrent user numbers, so it’s hard to compare. But based on registered users, it lags WhatsApp and WeChat, which have over 450 million and 355 million active users respectively.

Popularity-wise, it probably occupies the same band as Line but surpasses KakaoTalk. Line has 400 million registered users while KakaoTalk has 140 million. Viber’s user base is rather international, more so than KakaoTalk and WeChat where most of their users hail from a single country. A third of Viber’s users live in Asia, Viber CEO Talmon Marco tells Tech in Asia.

As far as we know, the Israel-based Viber isn’t making money: it reported a net loss of $29.5 million on $1.5 million in revenue in 2013. But the other chat apps are money spinners. Line, for example, made $338 million in 2013 from a mix of brand accounts, stickers, and in-app social gaming purchases.

An eagerly watched development is how it would integrate with Rakuten post-acquisition. Marco has nothing to announce at this point, though he adds that users can expect the chat service to take advantage of Rakuten’s services in the area of ebooks, travel, and many other verticals.

“Day to day, it’s business as usual for us – Viber maintains its brand, its culture and independence within the Rakuten group, while working closely with other Rakuten services,” he says.

See: Korean messaging app KakaoTalk to merge with Daum, the country’s second-largest web portal

Homegrown smartphones from the Philippines have increased in popularity over the past several years. Following the footsteps of giants like Apple and Samsung, a number of up and coming domestic smartphone makers have entered the market, tapping into the country’s rapid smartphone growth.

Since LTE is already up and running in the Philippines, many of these manufacturers have taken the opportunity to produce phones that take advantage of this. So let’s take a look at some of the LTE devices available in the Philippines.

Cherry Mobile Ultra

Cherry Mobile has become the fastest growing phonemaker in the Philippines, offering 84 phones in its lineup.

The Cherry Mobile Ultra is the first phone in Cherry’s roster to offer LTE, and it’s probably the company’s best offering so far. The device sports a five-inch 720p HD screen, a 13-megapixel rear and a 5-megapixel front camera, and runs on Android 4.3 and a 1.2 GHz quadcore Qualcomm processor.

Price: PHP8,999 (US$205)

ZTE Grand X Quad

The Philippines is one of the markets where China-based smartphone maker ZTE is looking to deepen its presence in. Last year, it launched a number of smartphones with the goal to lead the domestic smartphone market in three years.

Released last year, the ZTE Grand X is the company’s first LTE device. It has a 5-inch 720p screen, an 8-megapixel rear and a 1.3-megapixel front camera, and runs on Android 4.2 and a 1.2 GHz quadcore processor.

Price: PHP11,990 (US$273)

Nokia Lumia 625

Nokia is working to keep pace with its competitors these days as consumers around the world purchase smartphones. We previously discussed why it’s set to struggle in Asia. Nonetheless, it continues to roll out its Nokia Lumia phones across Asia.

In the Philippines, the Nokia Lumia 625 launched last September, aiming to be the lowest-priced LTE smartphone on the market. However, Nokia was dethroned as soon as Cherry Mobile’s Ultra hit the market.

The Nokia Lumia 625 has a 4.7-inch 480p screen, a 5-megapixel rear and a VGA front camera, and runs on Windows Phone 8 OS and a 1.2 GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor.

Price: PHP13, 200 (US$302)

See: 15 new Asian smartphone makers hoping to crush Samsung and Apple

Huawei Ascend P1

Huawei is one of the Chinese smartphone brands that’s making a huge presence in the country. Since its entry, the company has already offered a variety of products such as smartphones, tablets and wifi dongles. It has also partnered with telcos to bundle its smartphones with postpaid plans and opened a local concept store. One of its newer phones on the market is the Huawei Ascend G6.

The LTE version of the G6 has yet to be released in the Philippines and the Ascend Mate 2 won’t be released in the Philippines ever. But one of its LTE devices that did make its way to the country is the Huawei Ascend P1.

The Huawei Ascend P1 sports a 4.3-inch 540p screen, an 8-megapixel rear and 1.3-megapixel front camera, and runs on Android 4.0 and a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor.

Price: PHP19,890 (US$455)

Samsung Mega 6.3

For the Korean phonemaker, the Samsung Galaxy S5, which just launched in April, is its most advanced LTE smartphone to date. But with a price tag of PHP34,990 (US$797), chances are most consumers would rather consider more affordable models.

For consumers who want to grab a Samsung LTE device at a lower price point, the Samsung Mega is a great option. The Samsung Mega has a 6.3-inch 720p screen, an 8-megapixel rear and 1.9 front camera, and runs on Android 4.2 and a 1.7 GHz dual core processor.

Price: PHP23,990 (US$546)

Lenovo Vibe Z

When it started to release smartphones in the Philippines in 2012, Lenovo’s aim was to conquer five percent of the country’s smartphone market.

The Lenovo Vibe Z has a 5.5-inch 180p screen, a 13-megapixel rear and 5-megapixel camera, and runs on Android 4.3 and a 2.2 GHz quadcore processor.

Price: PHP24,999 (US$572)

Oppo Find 7

Yet another Chinese brand, Oppo, entered the Philippine market in April with the Find 7. Working on the nationwide distribution looks like just the start of its presence in the country. However, compared to other Asian players, Oppo’s smartphone is quite premium (comparable to Samsung’s S5), so it’s not clear if consumers will flock to it. Nonetheless, the company plans to expand its reach in the future by partnering with telcos.

The Find 7 has a 5.5-inch 2k HD screen, 13-megapixel rear and 5-megapixel front camera, and runs on Android 4.3 and a 2.5 GHz quad-core processor.

Price: PHP34,990 (US$801)

SingTel-owned mobile advertising company Amobee announced that it will acquire two other firms in the digital advertising space, Adconion and Kontera, for US$235 million and US$150 million respectively. Both companies will become part of the SingTel Group, Singapore’s largest telco.

Founded in 2005, Adconion’s previous funding rounds amount to US$114 million. The company specializes in online video, email, and social ads and has 2,000 clients. It made US$185 million in revenue last year.

US-based Kontera’s forte is in ad tech and analytics. It’s raised about US$36 million to date and made US$26 million in revenue in 2013. Amobee could not disclose whether the acquired firms are profitable.

Amobee will get more clients and more ad tech from the deal. Kontera holds 14 patents, and those will go to  SingTel. The telco has over 50 million mobile customers, and these acquisitions will allow it to better target internet users with ads. Allen Liew, CEO of SingTel’s Group Digital L!fe, says that Amobee is currently not profitable but expects to be in three to five years. Amobee’s goal for buying Adconion is to build the necessary scale needed to become a major contributor to SingTel’s bottom line.

SingTel has earmarked US$1.6 billion to acquire companies to boost its digital businesses. Last year, Amobee added real-time bidding to its offerings with the acquisition of GradientX. So far, it has spent about a quarter of that money, so expect more acquisitions to come.

Liew also hinted at Group Digital L!fe’s overall direction, without announcing specifics. Amobee is a big part of its future of course, but the Group also plans to focus on data analytics, big data, as well as mobile video entertainment services. Given the low penetration rate of fixed internet lines in developing markets, SingTel expects to have a big part to play in bringing digital content to smartphone consumers in those countries.

Adam is the co-founder and CTO of DesignCrowd.com, a logo, web and graphic design marketplace. Follow him on Twitter.

As web pages take on greater importance as the ‘face’ of many businesses, more sophisticated and powerful developer tools are being created to serve this growing demand. Building a website that maintains customer interest and has 100 percent uptime has become a challenge for many small businesses. Here are a few of the best web design tools that are easy to use and powerful.

Duo

Testing a responsive web design can be cumbersome. Duo makes it a little bit easier. It’s a browser that concurrently displays both desktop and mobile views. The widths can be easily adjusted.

Atom

Atom is a text editor, but unlike others that require arcane knowledge to customize, Atom is built on Javascript, HTML, and CSS. This means that designers and front-end developers can tweak to their heart’s content, in a language they already speak.

Webydo

WYSIWYG has come a long way since the days of high school students selling horrible Dreamweaver sites to the local fish and chips joint. Webydo is one of the more recent offerings in this space, and claims to help designers work with a powerful engine to produce production-quality work without having to get too deep into front-end development.

Myth

Myth is a Casting Style Sheet (CSS) preprocessor. CSS is a language used for describing the look and feel of a document. Myth lets you write CSS without worrying about browser and engine inconsistencies. It even helps you fill in browser prefixes. Very simple but powerful.

Glyphr

Pro font design apps are generally pricey. Glyphr Studio is a solution for the hobbyist or beginner, providing a free and accessible alternative with enough power to do some cool things. You can run it online or download the app — which is just an HTML file.

Dewey

Dewey builds on other Chrome extensions that help you tag and search your bookmarks better. It is suited to the way designers think by letting you add screenshots to bookmarks - useful for searching for the specific font out of 326 you bookmarked last week.

Layrs

Photoshop might be the seminal tool of the trade for most, but it isn’t without issues. Layrs adds some of those quality-of-life layer management features that help tame the garden of weeds that is Photoshop’s Layer section. It makes renaming easier, removes unused layer effects, deletes empty layers, rasterizes all smart objects, and so on.

Viewflux

Viewflux is a very cool feedback, prototyping and collaboration platform out of Romania. It helps you organize your projects, work on them with your teammates, create interactive prototypes, get feedback from your clients and iterate until the design is ready for developers. Viewflux is free while it’s in beta, and the release price is said to be low.

Stylify Me

Stylify Me scans a webpage and generates a style guide based on it. It includes backgrounds and text colors, a rundown of the typefaces and font settings used, and even a rundown of dimensions for images on the page. This is great if you want to generate a quick and handy style guide for one of your own projects or quick projects for a friend.

Type-Finder

We all know that selecting typefaces is part of the fun of design, but sometimes you just want to knock a page together quickly. Type-Finder asks five quick questions and spits out a list of potential fonts for each purpose.

Tiff

When you’re choosing between two really similar fonts but want to make sure you’re choosing the one that’s most suited to the project, Tiff might come in handy. It’s a cool, quick solution that lets you compare any font in the Google Web Fonts library or those on your system.

Ink

Ink is a plugin for Photoshop that allows you to provide better documentation for developers. Ink helps you include all the information developers need to get started on their work.

Social Recruiting, a Tokyo-based startup that claims to be Japan’s number one social recruiting service, received more than US$2 million in series A funding from domestic VC Global Brain. Exact details about the investment were undisclosed, but Social Recruiting CEO Hirofumi Kasuga confirmed with Tech in Asia that the figure was more than US$2 million but less than US$5 million.

The service utilizes social media to connect university graduates with more than 400 client companies. It boasts more than 200,000 annual users in Japan – equivalent to roughly a third of the country’s annual university graduates. Wantedly, another popular social recruiting service in Japan, serves about 2,000 companies and 65,000 users – but focuses primarily on higher-level positions for individuals with work experience.

According to Kasuga, the funding will be used to hire new engineers and expand further into Asia. “We have about 100,000 users in China and we’ve already entered Vietnam,” he says. “So now we will advance into South Korea and Singapore.”

Previously, Social Recruiting received 3.5 million yen (US$34,000) in seed funding from Samurai Incubate.

E-cigarettes are catching on fast, but the jury is still out on whether or not they actually help people quit smoking. Besides e-cigarettes, smokers worldwide have resorted to patches, gum, and other nicotine supplments to help cut down.

But until now, no one has really had a solid crack at another indispensable part of every smoker’s habit – lighters.

This is where US-based startup QuitBit comes in. The team recently graduated from China’s Haxlr8r program in Shenzhen, and its made out with US$175,000 in accumulated angel funding so far. Now QuitBit is nearing the end of its Kickstarter campaign to help pay for manufacturing costs.

QuitBit is a smart lighter that tracks how often you’ve been smoking with an LCD display. It measures how many cigarettes you’ve smoked, how long it’s been since you last lit up, and can even be set to limit how often you’re allowed to use it. All this information is synced with the QuitBit mobile app via Bluetooth Low Energy.

“We came up with idea for QuitBit specifically for ourselves,” says Ghofrani. “I wasn’t sure how much I was smoking a day.”

As opposed to e-cigarettes, which Ghofrani says many people use to supplement smoking rather than help quit, QuitBit quantifies the user’s habit. “It kept me aware of how much I was smoking a day and I could set targets,” says Ghofrani. “I quit six months ago and haven’t smoked another one since.”

Rather than an open flame, QuitBit uses a heating element similar to what you find in a car lighter.

If you’re using an e-cigarette on the side or you want to share your lighter with friends, all the data can be amended inside the app, or you can set it not to record when someone else is using it.

Strong sales in Singapore

Despite seeing success when raising angel funds, Ghofrani says he wants to “build a community around the product and prove out demand using Kickstarter.” The project already reached its US$50,000 goal, and a lot of that demand didn’t come from where he expected.

“A ton of presales are coming from Singapore,” Ghofrani says. “It was a complete shock to us. We thought the majority of our sales would be from America.”

He says 55 percent of pre-orders have come from international customers. Among them, Singapore leading the way with 7.1 percent followed by Japan, South Korea, and a few European countries (note these figures are from backers who self-report their countries). Ghofrani says even though smoking is prevalent in China where he spent four months in Haxlr8r, Chinese smokers don’t really want to quit.

Does it work?

Before joining Haxlr8r, Ghofrani got the help of a behavioral health center where five employees took part in a short one-month beta test with a QuitBit prototype. While Ghofrani doesn’t point to this as concrete scientific proof of QuitBit’s effectiveness, every one of the device’s users had cut down their smoking by an average of 30 percent.

This, in addition to his own experience, gives Ghofrani confidence that QuitBit will succeed. He expects QuitBit to start shipping sometime in December.

Xiaomi’s expansion into Southeast Asia is now on full swing. After launching in Malaysia last month, it announced today that its flagship Mi3 smartphone will arrive in the Philippines in the coming weeks.

Xiaomi hasn’t revealed the official sale date and price yet, but it’ll likely match China’s price of RMB1,699, which converts to around Php 12,000 (US$274).

Prior to this announcement, Xiaomi’s Philippine website and Facebook page already went live, which hinted at an upcoming launch. But unlike its other Asian debuts, the 16GB version of Mi3 will be sold in the Philippines not via their website, but through ecommerce site Lazada.

According to Xiaomi VP Hugo Barra, selling on Lazada makes perfect sense for the company as the ecommerce site offers cash on delivery payment, which most Filipinos are familiar with. Nonetheless, they will still sell via the website at a later date.

See: Xiaomi breaks into global top 10 for smartphone shipments, kicks out HTC

Xiaomi won’t disclose the exact number of Mi3 units it’ll sell in the country, but Barra says the first batch will be less than 5,000. It may possibly match Malaysia, where the company sold 4,000 units on its first sale.

The smartphone brand is known for obsessing over user feedback and implementing them quickly. Preparing to do the same in the Philippines, it has put up the MIUI Philippines forum where Xiaomi users can leave improvement suggestions for the devices’ software and hardware.

Apart from the site, Barra says the company will put up seven service centers and Mi home stores within Metro Manila.

Xiaomi will soon launch in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and India. No dates have been announced.

11 Main, the first consumer-facing ecommerce site from Alibaba in the US, announced today it has launched in beta.

At the moment, the site still requires an invitation before users can peruse 11 Main for goods. While we’ve yet to check it out ourselves, based on its branding and the company’s public statements,  it looks like it draws draws inspiration from the personalized feel of Etsy, meshed with the ‘anything store’ premise of Amazon.

The news comes more than four months after EcommerceBytes discovered that the up and coming business was the fruit of its purchase of Auctiva and Vendio, two companies that sold eBay listing management software. The acquisition gave Alibaba direct access to over 250,000 merchants, many of whom are presumably now listing products on 11 Main.

“At 11 Main, we’re passionate about the shops we invite and helping them grow,” said Mike Effle, president and general manager of 11 Main, in a statement. “We’re constantly introducing new shop owners who represent the diversity of Main Street and featuring their new, amazing products in a beautifully designed experience.”

News of the launch comes on the same day as Alibaba’s announcement that it acquired UCWeb, makers of one of China’s most popular mobile browsers. The company has embarked on a global spending spree in anticipation of its upcoming IPO, sinking cash into China’s Guangzhou Evergrande football club, Singapore’s state-affiliated postal service SingPost in the span of about two weeks.

See: Here’s our roundup of Alibaba’s investments in US-based companies

Marcus is the director of social media at SocialMetric.

In 2000, the term “social media” did not mean much to the masses. But as of 2011, online ad spend in Asia-Pacific amounted to just under US$22 billion.

By 2016, that number is projected to be over US$48 billion.

Expenditures in digital marketing are growing larger and wider, and that shows how much social media impacts our lives. But are we spending all that money wisely? Are we getting the returns we’re aiming for?

As the director of social media at SocialMetric, I have helped over 200 corporations and SMEs in all facets of digital engagement and social media. Some of my clients include 3M, Qatar Airways, Pernod Ricard, Capital Malls Asia, and Marco Polo Hotels, to name just a handful.

With my engagement framework, I have generated positive results for my clients. Here are some examples:

• Generated US$1.1m in tickets sales from Facebook in 48 hours for Qatar Airways.
• Saved $3.6m in marketing expenses for Wacoal.
• Generated HK$8.2m for Marco Polo Hotels using Digital Integration.

In this Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, I’m more than happy to discuss and answer any questions on:

• Measuring social media ROI
• Creating ROI-centric social media strategies
• Tips and strategies to producing content that goes viral in the social media space
• Identifying the right data and key KPIs to target
• Case studies of other startups who have generated great results through social media

Please put your questions in the comments section, and I’ll be answering them all day today (Thursday).

Hope Technik’s drone army. The cage sitting at the back is a proof-of-concept for allowing drones to move while indoors – think of it as a hamster wheel run amok.

Somewhere in Singapore, a black building sits in an obscure industrial estate, accessible only to determined Singaporeans. It’s not hard to spot though: it’s the only building there that’s painted black. Welcome to the home of Hope Technik, perhaps one of the most underrated tech companies in Singapore.

Founded and staffed by a group of hardware, software, and space engineers, the startup prides itself as a playground for tinkerers and geeks.

Sitting next to the entrance is an old-school roadster that is custom-built by a team member. A standard obstacle course – a dreaded thing among Singapore’s army conscripts – occupies the front lawn, serving as a testing ground for Hope Technik’s ground robots.

The company’s ten commandments, which accosts visitors upon entering, stands out the most. The ninth commandment goes: “We learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” The second one reads: “We are engineering commandos. Small in number, strong in force”.

Real-life Tony Stark

Hope Technik, which now has 50 employees (over half are engineers), defies categorization. It designs and makes drones for clients, yet also does simple exterior design work on police cars and fire fighting vehicles for the government. It pushes the limits on robotics and concluded a space plane project with Airbus, yet a lot of its income comes from consultancy and prototyping work that won’t have stratospheric returns in the short-term.

“We created the company because we like to design and engineer things,” Michael Leong, co-founder and general manager of Hope Technik, tells Tech in Asia. “We started offering services to help clients design and engineer products and solve problems. We wanted to be the best engineers in town.”

Hope Technik has more up its sleeves. It’s prototyping an exoskeleton (no photos allowed) that could have military, logistical, and healthcare uses. It could lift heavy objects and teach stroke patients how to walk again. The company has also sold a few dozen Alert devices that detect falls in a home and notifies a loved one – useful for elderly folks living alone.

The company is also betting massively on swarm artificial intelligence. Leong says that drones have a constraint: they’re conceived to replace a single person’s dull, dirty, and dangerous job. Instead, drones should create “force multiplication”, in which an attribute can multiply the effectiveness of a military force.

“With swarm intelligence, I only need to focus on my end-goals. Instead of being a middle manager of drones, I let the computer do it for me,” says Leong.

This could be useful in surveillance as well as search and rescue, as a group of drones can figure out among themselves which one needs to return to base, which ones need refueling, and so on.

The climatic battle of Iron Man 3 – a favorite movie within the company – explores this concept when Tony Stark called upon all his Iron Man suits to do battle against the enemy.

The rich industrialist trope features prominently in Hope Technik: Batman movie posters hang on its walls. So it’s unsurprising the company is chasing the space frontier and taking a page from Elon Musk.

A vehicle workshop which does alterations to firefighting vehicles and police cars.

The anti-startup

The company wasn’t yet shooting for the moon when it started in 2006. Leong and his fellow founders had a mad love for cars, and Leong was a race car engineer before founding Hope Technik. They initially did motorsports engineering, but demand for robotics work picked up and took the company in that direction.

Hope Technik’s growth defies Silicon Valley-influenced conventions. Instead of scaling rapidly from day one, it’s a consultancy firm that serves mostly Singapore-based customers – and the government’s a major client. Because it does client work, it had no need to raise money from investors as revenue came in pretty quickly.

Its lack of a singular focus is a contrast against single-product startups – think Facebook or Twitter – that are all the rage right now.

Hope Technik’s devotion to engineering is absolute, says Leong. It’s set to make US$8 to 10 million in annual revenue, and it’s now profitable. The company can’t reveal exact figures, but Leong says that it has always plowed profits back into engineering, be it 3D printers, test equipment, or university scholarships in which students need to work for Hope Technik upon graduation.

Now, the company wants to turn its devotion into a hundred million dollars within three years. Its trump card is Sesto, a set of technologies that ease the act of moving heavy objects in confined spaces.

After being placed under an object, say a hospital bed or a trolley, Sesto lessens the force needed to pull and push the object. In other words, a 200kg object would feel like 2kg, which is a hundred-fold reduction. It can move objects with a motor either programmically or using a remote control. The system is omni-directional, which means it can make sharp turns – ideal for maneuvering in narrow aisles within a hospital or warehouse.

With this technology, it plans to tackle the logistics and hospital sector, targeting Singapore, Germany, Korea, and Australia. It has secured distributors to do sales and maintenance for its products.

Patriotic tinkerers

Hope Technik is a microcosm of Silicon Valley, an engineer’s haven which celebrates solving global problems using technology. The tinkering spirit is strong in the company: it even invested time to build a testing oven out of a cargo container. The end product costs one-tenth of a commercial one.

Yet it’s distinctly Singaporean. “This is home for us,” says Leong. “The world outside is attractive. But Singapore is too. Our roots are here. Our families and girlfriends are here.”

It’s not just talk. Aside from the army references, Hope Technik is a wellspring of engineering expertise for Singapore’s research institutions, large corporations, and government. It’s even working with Singapore’s startups, building robots for drone SaaS firm Garuda Robotics, prototyping an automatic warehouse retrieval system with RedMart, and collaborating on a prototype with Airgo, which is reimagining airline seats.

Hope Technik will make all its products in Singapore, right inside Hope the company’s sprawling home base. In fact, it already does small volume manufacturing there, though it wants increase capacity to 10,000 units a year. It will fundraise to support the expansion.

Leong dismisses concerns that dabbling in so many research areas dilutes its focus. The company balances between problems it knows it can solve and problems that have large enough scale to be interesting. In any case, most fields of engineering have the same foundation.

“It’s about first principles like gravity. The configuration is the same. We took the first principles and apply it across a broad range of applications.”

But that does not necessarily make their work easier, especially for the type of engineering the company seeks to do.

“Our downfall is that we are not good at selling ourselves. But we take pride in pushing the boundaries for our customers. That’s our trademark,” he says.

“Innovation is painful… but we strive to make it happen, even if it means late nights, things breaking down, and tempers flaring. Sometimes we question ourselves, but the reward comes in seeing the light at the end.”

The sparse office is an arena for debates among the staff.

Small volume manufacturing at Hope Technik.

The lobby, consisting of drones, a slide, and a rock climbing wall.

See: This Singapore startup wants to remove killer litter from space

Yesterday at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei revealed that 70 percent of the company’s daily active users access its service on a mobile device, reports Mobile World Live.

That statistic ought to not come as a shocker when one considers that mobile devices tend to get more attention from their owners than PCs these days. But it’s one worth making mental note of as the company continues to evolve beyond from its legacy as a desktop-first social network. Pundits once accused Facebook, another desktop-first social network, of having a “mobile problem” before it revealed in late 2013 that its mobile ad revenue went from almost zero to US$656 million – about 40 percent of its total revenues – in the course of one year.

Former Weibo parent company Sina has embraced a “mobile-first” strategy since late 2012, but at least from a user experience point-of-view, the mobile app always felt cramped and cluttered compared to its desktop counterpart. Yet the growth of mobile internet access in China will inevitably make smartphones and tablets a key focal point for Weibo’s evolution.

“Since more than half of China’s total population is still not on mobile internet, Weibo will focus on capturing the big growth potential in the domestic market for now,” said Wang Gaofei, reported by WSJ.  “Third- to fourth-tier cities are important for Weibo’s future growth as they account for 60% of the country’s population.”

Weibo’s future mobile plays look set to resemble those of WeChat and other messaging apps. WSJ reports it will launch subscription plans for certain celebrity accounts, giving users increased access to their favorite movie stars and musicians. China Daily states that Weibo will dive into gaming, with plans to release one or two games every month. This latter move might be the company’s best hope as it competes with Tencent’s WeChat for user attention. Mobile games reinforce stickiness in social apps, as evidenced by the monster gaming revenues from Kakao in Korea and Line in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. The stakes are high for Weibo to acquire users and earn profits following its IPO in March.

As WeChat continues to expand its reach in mainland China, some observers have questioned Weibo’s ability to remain relevant to the country’s mobile phone owners. In January, an academic report claiming a 43 percent decline in Weibo users that posted “more than 40 times a day” surfaced online, marking the best evidence to date of a mass exodus of users from the site. However, even in the face of WeChat’s popularity, Weibo can maintain a strong use-case: unlike WeChat (and like Twitter), its posts are open to all users by default, which makes information easier to track and spread virally. Last month Wang told TNW that this differentiation will ensure it co-exists with WeChat, stating, “We don’t want to compete with Weixin in absolute amounts of time. But we want to make sure that people turn to us when they want to access public information.”

(Source: Mobile World Live, WSJ, China Daily)

Editing by Terence Lee, top image via Flickr user @N07

Japan remains one of the few developed countries in the world where possession of child pornography isn’t a punishable offense. That is expected to change by the end of this month when a bill, which passed unanimously in the Committee on Judicial Affairs last week, is presented to the Japanese Diet’s upper house.

A 1999 law known as the Act on Punishment of Activities Relating to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography criminalized the production and distribution of kiddie porn – but no provision was included to make actually owning it illegal.

Unsurprisingly, the possession loophole wasn’t an unfortunate oversight – it was done on purpose to protect Japan’s manga, anime, and video game industries (The Japanese gaming market alone is worth nearly US$10 billion). This exception for 2D and 3D depictions of child abuse will remain with the passage of updated legislation.

While few mainstream titles include “know-it-when-I-see-it”-esque child pornography, it’s quite easy to find books and video games that toe the line (or more accurately, walk up to the line and say, “Hello, line”) in stores around Tokyo – especially in the otaku mecca of Akihabara. The wildly popular idol group AKB48, named after Akihabara, includes an ever-expanding cast of girls as young as 13 who appear in various media donning bikinis and lingerie.

“I think the ban is pretty much international lip service, as most of the Japanese child porn out there is animated anyway,” Andy Klim, a freelance manga and video game localizer, told Tech in Asia. “If you look at how much money AKB48 makes, you can understand the country’s obsession with younger women. I kind of think though that the biggest reason manga, anime, and games are exempt is that that an actual child isn’t being hurt in them. My guess is that they see it as a way for people with that problem to get their release without having to hurt an actual child.”

Klim, who has been translating content for Japanese companies for more than six years, said that he once was asked to localize a dating simulation game that he described as “essentially a porn game starring high school students.”

“We were told to adjust the content as if the end audience was 12 years old,” he said. “You had situations though where a 17 year old boy was having sex with 13 and 14 year olds. The way we were asked to translate the material focused on making it legal in other markets. We were asked to change clear instances of sexual contact into hugging, kissing, or petting.”

“I don’t know how they got around the problem of the in-game images showing what was actually happening,” he adds.

The national age of consent in Japan is only 13 years old. However, individual municipalities often instate their own laws – Tokyo, for example, has a Youth Protection Law that raises the age of consent within the city limits to 17.

Only time will tell if the new legislation will have an effect on the number of children that get sucked into Japan’s dark side. But still, questions remain over the country’s reluctance to clamp down on explicit imagery that, while not directly harming a child, may entice a viewer to seek out warm flesh instead of a comic book or an X-rated video game.

Yu Yongfu, founder and CEO of UCWeb

Yesterday, Alibaba and UCWeb jointly announced the former’s full acquisition of the latter, publicly calling it the biggest merger in the history of Chinese internet companies.

Today, UCWeb founder and CEO Yu Yongfu gave an interview to foreign media to discuss his company’s role within Alibaba moving forward. While he remained vague about some of the details, here’s everything we’ve learned so far:

Really bigger than Baidu’s $1.9 billion acquisition of 91 Wireless?

Many were skeptical of this claim when it was put forward in the Chinese press release, and Yu avoided stating the exact sum of money involved in the merger. However, we do know that claim is based on UCWeb’s entire valuation, not just the remaining one-third of the shares that Alibaba didn’t already own.

Yu said that because the majority of the transaction was paid for in Alibaba stock instead of cash, the final price will be dependent on Alibaba’s valuation, which analysts estimate around US$168 billion. In fact, Yu even boasted that UCWeb could drive Alibaba’s stock value.

We can say with some confidence that UCWeb’s valuation lies somewhere south of US$3.4 billion. That’s because Alibaba is required to publicly report any acquisitions worth more than 20 percent of its assets, which now stand at around US$17 billion according to its SEC prospectus.

We’ll know for sure how much Alibaba paid when it updates the prospectus.

Where does UCWeb stand now?

UCWeb will maintain all of its branding for UC products like its mobile browser as well as the two companies’ joint project, Shenma. Mobile search engine Shenma is aiming for 200 million users by the end of this year. “In our internal deliberations, mobile search will be an important sector for innovation,” Yu said.

The company’s flagship mobile browser was last reported to have 500 million quarterly active users globally.

UCWeb’s mobile ad revenues will generate an estimated US$200 million, which are shared roughly 50-50 between the company and its partners. That number is expected to exceed US$500 million next year. The company’s gaming arm will also pull in more than US$100 million this year, and is projected to surpass US$250 million in 2015.

Yu says in three to five years, he plans to cross the one billion user mark across all the company’s products.

Once UCWeb is fully integrated into Alibaba, it will become the ‘Ali UC mobile business group,’ which will jointly lead development for browsers, mobile search, mobile gaming, mobile reading, and location-based services. It will also control PP Assistant, which UCWeb acquired in December, and will work with Alibaba’s other portfolio companies like Youku and Weibo.

Why Alibaba?

Yu has famously said before that UCWeb is “not for sale,” but the CEO said today the offer came directly from Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma two months ago, and he hadn’t even considered an acquisition prior to that. Ma and Yu first met in December 2008, and shortly thereafter Alibaba invested in UCWeb. The two companies have been close ever since, and Yu says he trusts Ma. “We share the same vision and the same dream together,” Yu says.

Alibaba pumped an additional round into UCWeb last year, which brought Alibaba’s stake to 66 percent. So why wholly acquire UCWeb if Alibaba already owned a majority stake? Yu explained that the majority of UCWeb’s voting board members were from his own company, so Alibaba didn’t really have control. Also, being a separate company made it difficult to consolidate and share finances.

Yu says he’s confident in Alibaba’s impending IPO.

As for helping Alibaba spread to international markets where UCWeb has proven popular – India, Southeast Asia, Russia – Yu said the two companies “will help each other,” but didn’t give any specifics.

With over 200 million Muslim people in its population, Indonesia is the biggest Islamic nation in the world. This is a huge market for anyone to grab, and that’s what women fashion ecommerce store Berrybenka ¹ aims to do with its launch of Hijabenka.

Overall Hijabenka, which officially hard launched last week, looks similar to its sister company. Both have similar user interfaces and identical payment methods. Hijabenka’s products all come from local stores, and sport a mix of local and foreign models on its product photos.

Hijabenka has actually been operational since April. Within its short lifespan, the website already has accumulated over 1,000 products from more than 100 brands, and facilitates about 50 transactions every day. By the end of this year, the team aims to work with 300 brands and expand its COD payment method from 50 cities to 100 cities.

The store will offer 20 percent discounts for its items up through the end of June. The Hijabenka announcement conveniently happens just before the big Ramadan holiday later this month.

Regarding sister company Berrybenka, founder Jason Lamuda explains that the site records about 1,000 daily transactions with over 300,000 registered users. Right now they are working with more than 500 brands.

Two competing Muslim-oriented fashion ecommerce stores in Indonesia are HijUp and Saqina.

This article was first published on the Indonesian version Tech in Asia ID.