If you’ve been watching the startup space in Myanmar, you’ve probably heard of MySQUAR. It’s a social network that recently pivoted to the mobile app platform space. Last time we checked, MySQUAR had over 100,000 users, and has been growing at a rate of about 50 percent month-to-month. This is particularly significant for Myanmar, where the internet penetration is around two percent.

While that doesn’t make it Myanmar’s biggest and baddest homegrown social app just yet, we’d been keenly following the startup’s progress – partially due to its Vietnamese-Canadian founder Rita Nguyen, who has been the main driver and evangelist for internet startups in Myanmar.

But it looks like there’s been a shake-up in MySQUAR’s leadership, and Nguyen’s now on the outs. Today the company issued a press release announcing Linda Lim as its new CEO, who “combines local knowledge with international experience from prior roles as a Visa executive leading the premium product division in San Francisco and her own consumer product company, mybotto. Linda is bullish on Myanmar: “Everything is changing so fast so it’s hard to put exact numbers to the rollout but Myanmar has announced plans to boost telecom coverage to 80 percent by 2016.”

In her statement, Linda focuses mainly on MySQUAR’s potential:

I’m excited to be working with the team at MySQUAR at the forefront of the technology movement in Myanmar. Our business is maturing – and like we always intended – our structure and leadership is changing to meet the needs of our increasingly local focus. As we’ve settled into the technology landscape, Myanmar’s challenges have become our own – and like the country itself – we have evolved to meet these challenges by reaching out to the country’s rich resources of local knowledge and local talent. Everyday our operations become better informed, more efficient, more innovative, and most importantly, more Myanmar.

Nguyen is not quoted in this press release at all, and is mentioned only to note that she has moved on to pursue interests outside of MySQUAR.

On her personal blog, however, Nguyen goes into great detail about how she believes she was unfairly ousted from MySQUAR. In a post titled “When Investors Turn Into Bullies,” she writes:

On May 9th I came back to HCMC to find out that the MySQUAR board of directors had removed me as the CEO with no notice and no reason given. During the course of that one hour meeting they had cut off my email and removed me from all the internal systems and have since changed the locks on the doors. Even worse, they did the same to my co-founder but didn’t even give her the courtesy of letting her know. Instead, she found out when one of the admins at the office called her to ask her about what was going on.

We recommend jumping over and reading the whole post so you can form your own opinion.

Rita Nguyen, founder and former CEO of MySQUAR, with her cofounder Nguyen Quynh Anh, who was “locked out” of the company.

Why the bad blood?

In the post, Nguyen accuses her key investors of staging a hostile takeover. She claims the events unfolded without warning, one day after she spoke publicly at Startup Asia Singapore about Myanmar’s internet population. The new acting powers effectively cut off Nguyen’s email, locked her out of the MySQUAR database, cut her health insurance, kicked her out of her apartment in Myanmar, and refused to pay for her expenses.

Nguyen had been founder and CEO of MySQUAR since May 2013. The startup, which has most of its engineering team in Vietnam and community managers in Myanmar, was raising its series A at pre-money valuation anywhere between US$8 to 13 million. It already received a $580,000 seed investment last year. Since its launch, the startup has made no revenue, but intended to monetize by last May. It seems likely that the alleged investor takeover and subsequent removal of Nguyen was connected to a feeling that the startup was not performing well financially. In her personal blog, Nguyen states that the startup ran out of money in May. She also claims that its main investors, Rising Dragon and Bell Pottinger, cut out its angel investors, which consisted of Nguyen’s friends and family.

We have contacted the key investors that she lists in her post as well as Linda Lim, the new acting CEO for comment. Linda gave no comment as to the details surrounding Nguyen’s departure. When we asked if anybody had left with Nguyen, contrary to the blog post, Linda stated that: “No one has left with Rita. And in fact, we continue to grow with new hires in both Vietnam and in Myanmar offices.”

We’ll be watching this closely as further developments arise and will keep you updated. Although it is not clear who instigated this nor who is in the right, it’s clear that it’s a lesson in choosing the right people to work with, be they investors or founders.

Bangalore-based ad retargeting company Vizury Interactive Solutions has raised $16 million in series C funding. Intel Capital, the global chipmaker’s venture capital arm, led this round. Private equity firm Ascent Capital and existing investors Inventus Capital and Nokia Growth were also part of it.

Vizury uses big data analytics to help ecommerce sites like Jabong in India and Yintai in China convert visitors into customers. For example, even when a visitor leaves an ecommerce site, ads for products she browsed through there would continue to appear on the sites she goes to subsequently. Travel, finance and Web 2.0 are Vizury’s other main verticals.

China connection

For an Indian tech startup, Vizury is special on two counts. It is a software product company and one of the few from India to get major clients like fashion retail leader Yintai and travel portal Ctrip in China. The fresh funding will help them to put down deeper roots in Chinese soil.

Parag Dhol, Managing Director of Inventus (India) Advisors, one of Vizury’s investors, told Tech in Asia: “Vizury already has bases in three big Chinese cities. With the new funding, they will extend their web-based solution into mobile, tablet and any other portable platform. The team in charge of this could be based in China.”

China presents some unique challenges. The language barrier and the difficulty of taking money out of the country are some issues Indian companies have faced. What is less known are the technology issues.

For example, even though the ecommerce ecosystem there is 35 times bigger than India’s, the IT system is “strangely flaky,’ pointed out Parag Dhol. “The huge pool of IT talent available in India is not available there. So to integrate the Vizury solution with a client’s website takes much longer,” he explained.

The early bet on China

Vizury is well placed to tackle these challenges, because they bet big on China within a year after starting up in 2008. “They identified China as a large market early on and made it part of their long-term goal. Once they did that, it was a matter of perseverance. They built a strong IT team in China and that has been a clincher,” Parag Dhol told Tech in Asia.

In this context, Vizury co-founder Chetan Kulkarni’s statement that it will go a long way in scaling up their China business, makes perfect sense. Vizury was among the first multinational adtech companies to enter China in 2009, where it now has strong relationships with domestic advertisers. “Our emphasis, right from day one, was on staying invested in challenging markets like China,” said Kulkarni. This might show the way to other tech startups from India eyeing the vast China market.

The big data edge

“Big data analytics is primed for take-off with the adtech ecosystem providing a major impetus,” said Sudheer Kuppam, Managing Director, Intel Capital, APAC Region, in a statement on the funding. Vizury’s big data platform processes over 30 terabytes of data daily. This includes purchase intent data of nearly 500 million users and tens of billions of dollars of retail transaction data. Meaningful insights derived from this data is used by Vizury’s proprietary algorithms to precisely target and engage users with personalized advertising.

Vizury’s global competitor is French ad retargeting company Criteo, which raised US$251 million on the Nasdaq last year. Kulkarni has said that Vizury may have an IPO next year, after expanding its reach.

(Top image via Flickr user Ajith Kumar )

Faced with rising hotel room rates, many tourists in Singapore have turned to shorter-term, far cheaper accommodation offered by sites like Airbnb and Roomorama, which have lots of rooms for rent listed in Singapore.

These disruptive startups currently face a slew of opposition from regulatory bodies around the world, including in Singapore. Most recently, Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB) confiscated two flats from their owners as they were renting out the space to tourists. The owners were evicted from their homes.

Authorities in Singapore disallow rental of private or public housing to anyone if the lease is under six months.

Both the HDB and Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) have investigated multiple cases over the past year involving offering short-term accommodation, but this is the first time that they have taken action. HDB has jurisdiction over public housing, while URA oversees private dwellings.

A source who has chosen to remain unnamed reveals that his friend was one of the two homeowners whose flat was confiscated. His friend had allegedly rented his apartment out via an agent on PropertyGuru, but the agent had fled as soon as the incident occurred. He is now uncontactable.

HDB acted on complaints from neighbors of loud noises and suspicious characters going in and out of the house. However, a HDB spokesperson declined to comment on that specific case.

Lena Sönnichsen, head of communications in APAC for Airbnb, could not confirm if either of the flats were Airbnb listings. She added that it is highly unlikely due to the price range, which was reported to be between S$25 and S$75 per night. The going rate for an entire apartment on Airbnb is typically much higher than that. Similarly, Roomorama’s founder and CEO Teo Jia En has stated explicitly that there are no HDB flats listed on their platform.

Are short-term rentals really illegal?

Airbnb has over a thousand Singapore-based listings on its site, while Roomorama has about 500. According to HDB, though, “transient subletting” is illegal in Singapore. A report states that HDB has investigated over 184 cases of short-term rentals in public flats over the last year. Meanwhile, the URA investigated over 2,100 cases in the same period of time, with another 350 over the course of the first four months of this year.

Interestingly, James Chua, CEO of Singapore-based Pandabed, revealed in an answer on Quora that short-term renting for private property is actually not illegal here. Having consulted with a law firm, they found that the six-month minimum rental period stated by the URA is a guideline, and not a law:

There is a caveat: if a guest causes a disturbance of any kind to the neighbourhood, the URA then has the authority to take action.

Chua did, however, concede that HDB short-term rentals were against the law. The minimum allowable period is clearly stated on a HDB page related to subletting:

Owners are not allowed to sublet their bedrooms on a short term basis. The period of subletting to each subtenant per application must not be less than six months.

On this topic, Sönnichsen states that Airbnb “requires hosts to follow local rules and regulations”. A quick search of the database reveals that most of the local listings are privately owned.

By and large, it seems that these companies do indeed adhere to the regulations set by HDB. The question now is whether banning short-term rentals in public housing outright, and the drastic action of evicting wayward homeowners, is reasonable or not.

A problem of space

The government maintains tight control over how land space is used in Singapore, and for good reason. The country has a lot to offer, but space is not one of those things.

The island-state faces overcrowding despite expanding its land area by about a sixth of its original size through land reclamation since the 1960s.

The influx of foreigners from 2000 to 2012 caused Singapore’s population to surge to such an extent that public infrastructure started bursting at the seams. Despite slowing population growth over the last couple of years, as well as plans to reclaim even more land to cater for a projected population of 6.9 million in 2030, the fear that the situation will not improve any further remains ever-present among the populace. These fears are not unfounded – housing and vehicle prices continue to test the boundaries of affordability.

The hotel industry has also been severely affected. They have recently come forward with concerns of a dire shortage of hotel rooms in the years ahead. A report by Chesterton Singapore projected that average occupancy rates would rise from 80 per cent in 2014 to 91 per cent in 2018, causing a room crunch which would drive room rates upwards.

For income and dignity

The premise of renting out bedrooms or entire houses is to make unused resources work for the owner. Rather than let extra living space languish unused, homeowners can rent it out to generate some income. Short-term rental platforms provide the perfect solution.

Earning extra cash can offset the exorbitant costs of housing, and that is especially important to young Singaporeans. The cost of local apartments has often been compared to superior alternatives overseas – sometimes in jest, but more often with a sense of despair:

Like it or not, future generations of Singaporeans face an uphill climb in paying off their housing loans. The government has introduced several schemes to help citizens with this cost in recent years, but many still find it expensive.

Is it right, then, for residents to rent out their subsidized housing for a profit? Ryan Ong, editor of financial comparison portal Moneysmart, thinks it isn’t.

“I am sure the main reason [for disallowing short-term rentals] is simply to discourage people from staying with their parents, and then applying for flats just to rent them out,” he says. “If that person doesn’t really need the flat but just wants to rent it out for profit, it should instead go to someone who truly needs the housing.”

Chua, however, thinks that short-term rentals should be allowed – at least for retirees and senior citizens. In a statement made at the opening of the Singapore-based Sharing Economy Association last night, he explained that this would provide the elderly with a dignified way to earn income in their old age. After all, an elderly person’s house is still their biggest asset at the tail-end of the 30-year loan they would have taken out to finance it, and it’s their right to make use of it as they see fit.

Why regulate?

Despite the HDB and URA’s attempts to explain why it’s disallowing short-term rentals, some residents are unconvinced. A homeowner who rents out his place on Airbnb, who only wants to be known as Richard, finds this unacceptable.

“HDB and URA regulations make no sense. They can’t even tell us why it’s not a good idea to have people stay over for a few nights. How does this harm Singapore at all?” asks Richard.

“Those who can’t afford to stay in a hotel will end up skipping Singapore altogether, and consequently less foreign exchange will be earned by Singapore in general. My point is that if we are all making money, we will have extra to spend on the economy – everyone wins [...] Instead of making everything illegal, they should let us speak out.”

He adds that lawmakers and politicians seem unable to understand the problems faced by the nation’s middle and lower class citizens.

A HDB spokesperson explained to Tech in Asia that their regulatory stance is for the purpose of protecting the interests of other residents – specifically, to keep the living environment safe.

Darius Cheung, CEO and founder of property search websites Homie.co and 99.co, confirms that this is usually a cause for worry among the residents and landlords that he deals with. “There is a real concern with the security issues of having short-term visitors moving in and out of apartments quickly,” he says.

See: With $560,000 in hand, 99.co is the Airbnb for long-term property rental

But is security really a huge concern for Singaporeans? The island-state is the second-safest country in the world right now, according to the US-based World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2014.

However, the Singapore Police Force has identified a rise in serious property crimes over the last year, which they attributed to cyber extortions. This may present a real concern to those who are considering whether to rent property via online platforms, regardless of whether for long-term or short-term stay.

Perhaps the concern is not with crime per se, but more a general sense of insecurity. A URA spokesman adds in the report on The New Paper that most homeowners do not want to live among transient strangers. An article on the URA website states a sense of comfort as the reason:

Allowing residences to be used for short stays leads to high turnovers of occupants, and gives rise to nuisance and safety concerns. Most of us do prefer some familiarity with the people who live around our homes.

Simply put, residents feel ill at ease with strangers moving in and out of neighboring apartments. A vague sense of discomfort, however, might not warrant booting culprits out of their flats.

Alternatives to heavy-handed measures

Many might find that the outright confiscation of HDB flats is too harsh a measure. It is questionable whether a homeowner whose flat has been confiscated would ever be able to purchase another HDB flat again.

A HDB spokesperson assured Tech in Asia that whenever HDB reacquires flats, they will ensure that the evicted parties have alternative accommodation.

Rather than punishing people making use of these new web services, the authorities involved should address the root of the problem by ensuring that the platforms in question adhere to regulations. Of course, since the renter himself flouted the rules set by HDB in renting his place out on a short-term basis, a heavy fine should ensure that he never does it again.

Given the benefits of short-term rental, a compromise between the governing bodies and companies involved would be ideal. Teo, Roomorama’s CEO, believes that a mutually agreeable solution can be struck:

This is not an issue that will go away soon [...] given that there is demand for short-term accommodation in Singapore, and hotels are often too pricey for people staying for more than a week, or are simply in short supply. With dialogue, all sides can express their areas of concern, and try to come to a mutually agreeable solution.

Ong from Moneysmart suggests that regulatory measures be put in place to check who these houses are being rented to. This would help in preventing unlawful usage of flats, as well as alleviating the concerns of neighboring residents.

An issue with this solution is that it would take considerable collaboration and openness between the authorities and companies in this industry to enforce such measures. Dialogue between the parties involved, therefore, is key to making this a reality.

Another solution that should appease the government would be to tax short-term accommodation platforms. This should address the concern that all the profits from subsidized housing is going into the pockets of these corporate entities.

One thing is for certain: short-term rentals aren’t going away anytime soon. The sharing economy in Singapore is slowly but surely gaining traction, and the recent opening of the Sharing Economy Association will certainly help in pushing it forward. As Eugene Tay, president of the Sharing Economy Association, puts it: a middle ground has to be achieved with the authorities involved.

(Image credit: Flickr user Khánh Hmoong)

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has just three Supercharger stations in China right now where its electric cars can juice up. But Tesla has confirmed today that it’s all set to build 40 Superchargers in China thanks to a new partnership with two of China’s biggest retail and real estate companies.

The tie-up with InTime Retail (HKG:1833) and SOHO (HKG:0410) will see the charging stations installed at malls owned by the two Chinese firms. While Tesla’s current Superchargers are limited to Beijing and Shanghai, the new deal will bring stations to new cities, such as Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chengdu.

Tesla started shipping vehicles to Chinese customers in April, but only for those in Beijing and Shanghai, where the company had charger stations ready.

This new deal will allow Tesla to start shipping its vehicles to customers in other cities.

Once Tesla has 40 dedicated charging points in China, the nation will be better covered than Europe, which has 20 stations at present, according to Tesla’s homepage. There are 96 across the US.

Helpdesk software company Freshdesk – an Indian startup that quickly scaled up to rub shoulders with the global leaders in its domain – has raised US$31 million in a series D round of funding led by Tiger Global, which brings its total investment to US$44 million. Of particular interest is the participation of Google Capital – one of the two VC arms of the search giant. This makes Freshdesk the first Indian company to get backing from Google Capital, which has only five other companies in its portfolio. Accel Partners also participated in this round.

Sneak peek of the new Freshdesk office

Freshdesk will use the fresh funds to step up its global expansion. The SaaS-based company acquired 10,000 new customers in the last two quarters, bringing the total number on its roster to 23,500 in 120 countries. These include firms like 3M, Hugo Boss, and Petronas. Growth in the North American market, where its main competitors Zendesk and Desk.com are based, has been a priority area. Hiring a US-based president helped in the scaling up.

“We already have a great product which is doing very well, so distribution is the focus now.” Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk, tells Tech in Asia. “This funding will help in sales and marketing. For example, in non-English-speaking countries like France, Germany and Poland, language is a challenge. We have started a channel program to overcome this with the help of local resellers.”

New forms of customer support

A recent G2 Crowd report rated the helpdesk from Freshdesk as the best in comparison with Zendesk and Desk. But rather than resting on its laurels, Freshdesk is constantly upgrading itself. In January this year, the company came out with FreshService, an in-house IT support service. The response has been good, Mathrubootham says, and a lot more research and development will now go into ramping this up.

One of the biggest customer segments for Freshdesk now is ecommerce. Mathrubootham recounted how they noticed a disjunct between customer enquiries and order fulfilment because they were on different tracks. Freshdesk integrated the system to make these processes seamless, which in turn reduced response time.

Another new venture from Freshdesk is Freshfone. This recognises the reality that a lot of people are still more comfortable talking to support personnel over the phone rather than getting help online or on social media. Freshfone integrates phone support into its helpdesk software so that companies can also talk to their customers over the phone through Freshdesk. This will also keep track of the conversations, customers, and their problems. “With Freshfone, there is no need for companies to invest in expensive telephony solutions separately,” Mathrubootham claims.

“Customer support is undergoing a dramatic shift globally — fueled by the rise of cloud computing, subscription pricing, mobile devices and social media. Freshdesk has embraced and accelerated this shift, helping their clients provide great customer service,” said Gene Frantz, general partner at Google Capital, in a statement today.

This Chennai-headquartered tech startup thought big from the very outset and it’s paying off.

Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma continued his company’s pre-IPO bachelor party today by signing a deal with China Post to deliver online purchases to anywhere in China within 24 hours, according to ShanghaiDaily.

China Post is the country’s biggest postal service, and has offices pretty much everywhere, including rural areas. The two companies are also looking into making international deliveries via China Post’s global network.

No monetary figures were disclosed in the report.

This isn’t the ecommerce titan’s first foray into logistics. Late last month, Alibaba announced a US$250 million investment into SingPost, Singapore’s national postal service. In December last year, Alibaba sunk US$364 million into electronic appliance maker Haier to leverage its network of brick-and-mortar stores and warehouses.

Alibaba’s spending spree has only picked up as its planned August IPO approaches. Earlier this week, it bought the remainder of mobile browser maker UCWeb that it didn’t already own and opened up its first consumer-facing ecommerce site in the US. Last week, it bought a national soccer team. It even plans to open its own mobile telco in the coming weeks. And all this has happened just since it filed with the SEC last month.

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

(Source: ShanghaiDaily; top image credit: Michael Pham via Wikipedia Commons)

Startup entrepreneurship has become so deeply entrenched in our culture that founders have become subject to certain stereotypes. It’s easy for the public to imagine all startup entrepreneurs as outgoing, tenacious, and extroverted warriors.

While there’s inevitably some truth to these stereotypes, for founders that deviate from the perceived norm, these cultural expectations can mount and cause further stress. Amidst personal and professional pressure, it can be difficult to find a safe and cathartic release.

Lim Der Shing, founder of career media company JobsCentral, believes this inability to sound off is made more complicated by the fact that it’s hard for outsiders to understand what an entrepreneur is going through. He explains: “Others won’t understand [what you are going through] and may misinterpret your feelings, concluding that your business won’t work. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Some believe that entrepreneurs should be more open with their feelings, which might in turn alleviate their emotional burdens. However, while more entrepreneurs in the West have started to speak up about their problems, the topic of depression within the startup community remains a taboo across Asia.

Saving face and avoiding misunderstandings

According to Jacqueline Low, COO of Singapore-based corporate services firm Janus Corporate Solutions, the fear of being perceived as a failure likely drives reluctance to talk about problems faced. “Asians have a strong ‘saving-face’ mentality in which they’re generally unforgiving of failures, as it is perceived that failures mean weakness,” she said in a CNBC report.

See: How Asia’s top tech entrepreneurs stay productive

After selling JobsCentral to US-based CareerBuilder back in 2011, Lim is currently a partner at Jungle Ventures. By any measure, he is certainly a “successful entrepreneur.” But behind the veneer of success lay several episodes of ever-present, ongoing struggles. He recalls:

In the first six months after starting up,  we had no funding and no clear revenue model. In those days, I constantly felt like giving up. Even later on as we started to become profitable, sales were still spotty. We would have six months where we would be selling a fair bit, while the following six months of the year would be very quiet. During those latter six months, watching our bank balance go down steadily was quite stressful – we were also fearful of not being able to pay the salaries of the staff who joined us.

Lim also experienced a period of depression following the resignation of one of their working partners. “I remember being very worried [at that time], but fortunately the rest of my partners rallied together and closed ranks even more. So we went through that period quite okay.”

The early days of any startup are always the most challenging, so the onset of emotional stress comes as expected for most entrepreneurs. Feeling a bout of worry over a key member of the team also seems par for course. However, Lim also faced a huge amount of stress at a rather unlikely period of time – two years after the sale of JobsCentral.

“I was reaching the end of my earn-out, and had to decide if I was still the right person to continue leading the company,” Lim says. “This led to a lot of soul searching as I had to be sure what I was doing was best for the company, my staff, and of course for myself. During that period, I became disengaged, and for the first time in life I did not feel happy at work.”

Finding solace on a lonely journey

For most entrepreneurs, the journey to success is often a lonesome one, fraught with insecurities – especially for solo founders. Steven Goh, CEO and founder of mobile chat firm migme, did not mince his words when he described his own path.

“It’s lonely and it’s hard. People say it’s lonely being a CEO – it’s even more so as both a founder and CEO,” he says. “During your down moments [...] no one is going to get you out of wherever you are but yourself.”

Goh has experienced his fair share of down moments. Just last year, he was wrongly accused of infidelity by a major news outlet in Singapore, though they eventually retracted the article and issued an apology.

How does one claw his or her way through the valleys of depression and come out the other end victorious? As an optimist by nature, Lim found that it was easier for him to shrug off negative emotions compared to others. Most importantly, however, he stressed the necessity of having loved ones and close entrepreneur friends to support him. Lim considers himself especially fortunate that his co-founder, Huang Shao-Ning, is his better half in life.

“In the early days [when sales were slow], it was Shao-Ning who knocked some sense into me, and we pivoted our business into campus recruitment,” he shares. “I am lucky that we can always confide in each other our fears of business risk and failure.”

The backing of family members also kept him afloat while he struggled to get back on his feet. “I had supportive parents in the sense that they helped supplement our initial income, and later also helped us to look after our kids as they came along,” he explains.

Lim believes that fears and struggles should only be shared among a select group of people. He says:

Only privately, either with loved ones or with fellow entrepreneurs, can we share how we actually feel and the fears we have. For the sake of our own sanity, I think it is best to have a regular group of entrepreneur friends or loved ones who understand what you are going through and who can listen to you.

Goh takes a different stance that is befitting of a solo founder when it comes to fighting the good fight. “Here’s my advice to young entrepreneurs: get over it, and be responsible for yourself. When people say it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, they’re actually dramatically understating the amount of perspiration involved,” he says. “If the vision is worthwhile, stay focused on it and as the Nike ad says, ‘Just Do It’.”

(Image credit: Flickr user tokyoform)

Chinese job search site Zhaopin (NYSE:ZPIN) debuted on the US stock market yesterday at US$13.50 per share.

The fresh stock performed well, opening at $14.51, rising 16 percent to US$15.67 by midday, and settling to $14.65 at the closing bell.

The company reported its IPO raised US$75.7 million, which will be used to expand to new markets, make improvements to its website, pursue its mobile strategy, and acquire other companies.

Zhaopin claims to be the most popular career-focused wbsite in China by daily unique visitors, and the second largest online recruitment services provider by revenue. Its prospectus reports 74 million registered users, and over 10.5 million job postings were placed on Zhaopin by 226,000 employers in the last half of 2013. About 54.4 million resumes are available on its database as of December 31, 2013.

The company made US$82.8 million in revenue during the last of last year.

Just days before Zhaopin went public, it wholly acquired the China arm of Hong Kong-based JobsDB for US$15.7 million.

It’s not just Baidu, China’s top search engine company, that’s looking to developing nations for new market opportunities with hundreds of millions of first-time netizens. Now Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), China’s second biggest search engine, is doing the same thing.

The new battleground is software. It’s a battle taking place in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, and Thailand, where the number of web users will double from 2010 to 2015. Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) started this a couple of years ago when it began pushing its antivirus software in Southeast Asia – it was treading a path beaten by smaller and more adventurous Chinese companies like UCWeb, maker of the popular mobile browser app. Now Qihoo is doing the same with its own software offerings.

Kevin Tellier, business development manager of Qihoo’s relatively new global team, says the company is looking to areas like Southeast Asia and Brazil with four of its Android, iOS, and Windows apps. Three of them are related to antivirus, while the other is the 360 Browser app for PCs. They’re marketed under the 360 Safe brand on an English-language homepage.

360 Browser has already surpassed Internet Explorer in China, and now Qihoo wants to try replicate that elsewhere. The 360 Browser app sells itself on security, and comes with a built-in file download scanner in addition to more conventional safeguards such as anti-phishing tools. However, since many developing nations are going straight to mobile (with cheap Android smartphones) and bypassing PCs, it’s a surprising omission that the company’s 360 Browser for Android app remains limited to the Chinese market.

Focus on security apps

Tellier says Qihoo wants to be known “first and foremost for security services” in its new markets, pitting it against names such as Avast and Norton.

That could extend to Qihoo’s new hardware, which is currently limited to consumers in China. At the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai this week, Qihoo is showing off its little gadgets to international visitors to gauge their reactions. There’s a wi-fi dongle, an Android “smart key” that’s a clone of Pressy, and a wearable gizmo for children (pictured below) that allows parents to monitor where their kids are at.

The company has no comment on whether its web empire – which in China covers 360 Search, 360 Answers, an AOL-style web directory, and online advertising – will also venture abroad. Clearly it’s a lot harder to adapt and localize web services than it is a suite of apps. Arch-rival Baidu seems close to launching its search engine in Thailand, Brazil, and Egypt – markets where it has already been active for years with a mix of software offerings and web products such as a simple web links directory.

Whatever the extent of Qihoo’s overseas ventures, the company looks set to clash with Baidu on a number of new fronts.

But without any web products operating outside of China, Qihoo’s monetization options are limited with its free software. In China, its web browser and antivirus apps are part of a huge ecosystem that prints money out of ad clicks, referrals, and driving search engine traffic – a lot like Google. Outside of China, that’s not yet possible for Qihoo. “Our priority is in users,” adds Tellier. “Monetization [in new markets] is a question to be answered later.”

Japanese telco Softbank (TYO:9984) will invest over $20 million in startups in the Philippines with the creation of a new fund, Tech in Asia has learned.

The Softbank venture fund in the Philippines is set up with the help of its regional partner, IP Ventures (IPVI). SoftBank China and India’s Bodhi Fund invested in IPVI in 2011. It will be led by IPVI’s CEO Enrique Gonzalez and also Softbank’s very own Kabir Misra, Katsumasa Niki, Teddy Himler, and Yen Theng Tan.

Himler, Softbank’s capital associate, explains why the Philippines has been singled out:

We have been attracted to the robust macroeconomic growth and favorable demographic attributes of the region, but have also have been impressed at the micro-level, namely the breadth of talent and burgeoning culture of entrepreneurship in the region. We are taking a long view in the development of the Filipino economy, particularly its tech ecosystem.

In the Philippines, Softbank is looking to invest in growth-stage startups that are category leaders in ecommerce, digital media, payments, advertising technology, and cloud services.

“We are also focusing on retail, food and beverages, and other areas exposed to the Philippine’s fast-growing consumer economy,” says Himler.

See: Indosat partners with Softbank to launch $50 million fund in Indonesia

Charging into Southeast Asia

Softbank has been very active in Southeast Asia lately. Just last month, it announced a $50 million venture capital fund, jointly established with Indosat and Trikomsel, which will invest in Indonesian growth-stage startups. In Southeast Asia, Softbank has so far invested in Tokopedia (an Indonesian e-commerce marketplace), Ini3 (a Thai gaming company), and TMG (a Singaporean gaming startup).

Elsewhere in Asia, Softbank has also been very active in China, having recently invested $10 million in peer-to-peer lending site Edai and also being the lead investor in Wandoujia’s $120 million round.

“We just looking forward to meeting more ambitious entrepreneurs [in Asia] and figuring out how we leverage the expertise of both local partners and that of SoftBank to take these businesses to the next level,” adds Himler.

(Image credit: House of Japan)

HTC’s TV ads with Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr were controversial.

HTC’s chief marketing officer Benjamin Ho is in the fight of his life. Since taking over the role in 2012, he has been trying to reverse the phone maker’s flagging fortunes and make the brand desirable to consumers once more.

The results were mixed. Despite launching the HTC One to critical acclaim, the company wasn’t profitable in the first quarter of 2014. That was its third loss in three quarters. You can’t blame marketing for everything, but it did play a part.

Now, the company’s top brass hopes the sequel to the HTC One, dubbed the M8, can bring it out of the doldrums. It’s a repeat of 2013: critics are fawning over the phone, which has a sleek aluminum finish, a depth sensor for the camera, and some nifty touch gestures.

But as the first version of the One showed, excellent design alone won’t be enough to win the day. But here’s why the company still believes it can have a good 2014.

HTC flagship phone may be the one, but it’s not a solo effort

Without divulging any hard targets, Ho believes HTC can improve on its global smartphone market share of three percent due to a bigger line-up of products. Besides the One, the company has the Desire line of mid-tier phones.

It’s also planning to launch a tablet and a smartwatch in the latter part of 2014. While details about the smartwatch are scant, the tablet is reportedly an 8.9 inch Nexus model.

“In one quarter we announced three new models. We will have a much richer and fuller portfolio,” says Ho. The wider array of products could allow HTC to sell more units and make up for lost time.

It’s taking a bite out of Apple’s playbook

HTC emulates Apple in many ways. It targets discerning consumers in developed markets that shell out more for better phones – exactly the same kind of gadget lovers coveted by Apple. It is selling the first version of the One even as it promotes the M8, just like how Apple is still shifting the iPhone 5 despite already releasing the 5s.

HTC also believes in taking a slower, more deliberate pace to innovation. It’s not clamoring to be the first few to market like Samsung with the Galaxy Gear. Rather, it is studying consumer behavior – including that of HTC customers – to figure out why they would want a smartwatch.

“Sometimes it’s good to be first. But with new product categories, I prefer to be the first to observe and first to learn.”

Besides a thin form factor, Ho believes health tracking will be the killer app for smartwatches – an approach that follows Apple’s rumored iWatch. Conserving battery life is also a priority – consumers expect smartwatches to have more stamina than their phones – although there’s no sign how it plans to achieve that.

“You don’t want a big chunky piece as your watch. Do we have to design it more like a lifestyle watch? I think there’s a compelling reason for it.”

Robert Downey Jr. has paved the way for HTC

With a much smaller marketing budget than competitors like Apple and Samsung (HTC is outspent 13 to 14 times by them), it needs to make every dollar count.

The phone maker received a lot of attention – and ridicule – when it paid Iron Man star Robert Downey, Jr. to front a publicity drive that gave consumers no indication of what the brand is about.

But Ho insists it was worth it. HTC does not have the luxury of time to go on a traditional brand building exercise because the industry moves fast.

“We need rocket fuel. That’s the reason why we went with Robert Downey, Jr. to give us that kind of boost.”

Due to these efforts, HTC’s brand awareness in English-speaking markets that played those ads jumped from 10 percent to 15 percent.

Building on that, it began a series of ads in which actor Gary Oldman invites consumers to go online to check out how the One compares to other phones. It’s meant to show that HTC is confident in the quality of their products.

Quarterly earnings don’t reflect the true health of the company

Ho is not rattled by HTC’s Q1 2014 financial results, in which it suffered a net loss of US$62 million on US$1.4 billion in revenue. In fact, he points out that the company made a small profit in 2013. That’s not a cause for celebration though: HTC’s revenues that year were the lowest since 2010.

The financial results – and the endless scrutiny surrounding them – highlights HTC’s awkward position. Unlike rising star Xiaomi, it lacks the flexibility to pursue a growth-first strategy and sell phones at cost for the sake of achieving critical mass. Instead, it needs to answer to profit-minded shareholders in the stock market.

Also, as a pure hardware firm with only three percent market share and no other reliable revenue streams, HTC is at a disadvantage against Apple and Samsung in what’s essentially a volume game. It needs to stay listed to raise enough money to keep up with the giants.

The ‘RSVP’ approach

HTC’s status as a listed company influences its business decisions. While it aspires to, in Ho’s words, be a “thought leader”, it needs a dose of pragmatism. Ho calls this the “RSVP” approach to building a business – focusing on relevance, scalability, viability, and profitability.

Counting HTC out now would be a mistake. Fortunes change quickly in the mobile industry – Motorola, Nokia, and BlackBerry have all seen their fortunes fade in the span of a few years.

On the flip side, Apple was able to reverse its trajectory after Steve Jobs retook the helm as CEO and introduced the iMac.

HTC doesn’t have Steve Jobs, but it’s standing at an interesting, epoch-making time in computing: wearable devices could go mainstream in the next couple of years, buoyed by interesting apps like activity tracking and the internet of things. Ideas like modular phones and virtual reality are emerging too.

If the company plays its cards right, it could propel itself back on top by gaining a foothold in new product categories, while at the same time incrementally building its smartphone market share by taking advantage of a mature Android ecosystem.

The HTC One, despite all its flash and pizazz, is in reality a defensive maneuver. The smartphone market is getting increasingly competitive, with many up-and-comers like Oppo and Xiaomi competing for attention against incumbent phone-makers for ever-shrinking profit margins.

What competitors need to pay attention to is the stuff HTC has shrouded in mystery.

This article was originally published in our bi-weekly premium emagazine. Find out more info about TiA Premium here.

The Tokyo-based startup behind Synclogue, an app that allows Windows users to sync applications (and their respective settings) across multiple computers, is launching an English version of its service this week. The launch signals yet another Japanese startup offering English-language support as many look to gain feedback – and traction – in international markets.

Synclogue syncs Windows apps across multiple PCs without the user having to tweak settings each time they install. It supports many of Windows legacy apps – those which are not available in the Windows Store – and is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.

Synclogue CEO Tao Yamamoto wants to make synchronizing Windows apps as smooth as the process is for iOS users.

“If you own an iPhone, you’ve probably experienced the simplicity and power of Apple’s synchronization technology,” Yamamoto told Tech in Asia. “When you get a new iPhone you simply plug it into your computer and you immediately get all your iPhone apps, including their settings, installed on your new phone.​ This is the functional elegance that Synclogue is working to bring to the world of Windows legacy applications.”

A major benefit that Synclogue claims to have over competing platforms like RemoteApp is that it allows synchronized apps to run locally – meaning that an internet connection isn’t required to use them. Yamamoto also stresses that Synclogue was designed for individuals, not enterprise customers, and that ease of use is a high priority.

Synclogue received seed funding from Samurai Incubate in 2009 and completed its approximately US$5 million series A funding, led by Nissay Capital and SMBC Venture Capital, in 2012.

“The service is in free beta in both Japan and overseas with the goal of letting people test it and use it so that Synclogue can ​best ​understand its users’ needs and refine its service offering,” Yamamoto adds. “The ​basic monetization strategy ​has been to charge a monthly fee for the product ​once it is​ out of beta.”

App-connected limo service Uber is about to meet a surprising new rival on its home turf. Chinese startup Yongche, which is China’s top on-demand car site, is set to launch in San Francisco and New York.

The twist is that Yongche will focus on recruiting Chinese-speaking limo drivers so as to target the sizable Chinese leisure and business travel market in the US. Herman Zhou, Yongche’s founder and CEO, explained to Bloomberg that Chinese travelers tend to struggle with using cabs and other forms of transport in English. “We will have Chinese-speaking drivers in the U.S. and other places to make it seamless and stress-free,” he added.

The Beijing-based startup then plans to expand the service to Los Angeles, Boston, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo – all cities popular with Chinese travelers. China’s tourists took 98 million trips abroad last year, up from 83 million trips in 2012. Zhou gave no timeline for any overseas launches.

Yongche covers 57 mainland Chinese cities, plus Hong Kong, and has two million registered users. It has 50,000 cars available on the platform – all signed up from third-party limo companies, using the same business model as Uber. Zhou added in the interview that he wants Yongche to be in 150 cities by next year and have 20 million users. It secured US$60 million in funding towards the end of last year.

Uber rolled into China in 2013 and currently operates in four Chinese cities, plus Hong Kong.

(Source: Bloomberg)

There’s been a lot of drama in the Vietnamese startup ecosystem recently. A few weeks ago, Le Thi Thu Thuy, the CEO of VinEcom, Vietnam’s biggest ever ecommerce project stepped down from her position. Just yesterday, Rita Nguyen, the founder and CEO of MySquar, stepped down after an apparent power struggle. Today, we’ve got one more dramatic development. Greengar, one of Vietnam’s most promising mobile app startups, officially closed down. The announcement was made today on the Medium blog of the founder Truong Thanh Thuy. In a post titled “Failure of a success,” she states:

This blog is not an explanation but rather an appreciation to our supporters. I’m thrilled by all the support I received from everyone from Vietnam to Silicon Valley  –  from finances to time, especially our co-founders, teammates, advisors and investors. Our users have been the biggest inspiration for us to continue developing many awesome apps for the last five years.

The startup produced over twenty apps. Though some failed to attract users, others garnered over 15 million downloads. With those numbers, Greengar put over $1 million in the bank and was later funded by Silicon Valley accelerator 500 Startups. For Vietnamese startups, especially in the mobile space, this is a series of rare achievements and many were watching closely to see Greengar’s growth.

Thuy (pictured below) explained to Tech In Asia that there are a lot of lessons to learn from Greengar’s story.

One of the key things Vietnamese startups can learn from Greengar is even with millions of downloads and over a million dollars in the bank, this is no guarantee of success and a long-term business.

Greengar’s undoing was that its apps didn’t have serious business models behind them. Arguably, the app that Greengar put the most effort into was Whiteboard, which allowed users to collaborate on virtual whiteboards at the same time. However, it didn’t take off as expected.

But this is not the end of the Greengar team. Although the company is now gone, the team is moving on to a new stealth project. We’ll update you on that as soon as they’re ready.

Along with the recent shutdown of Saigon Hub, Vietnam’s biggest coworking space, today’s news might prove depressing for many in the tech industry. But don’t get depressed. It’s refreshing to see Vietnamese entrepreneurs standing up, unafraid of their failures. It’s also a helpful reminder that the majority of startups end up failing, no matter how large they grow.

But good news lies ahead. Tech In Asia has it on good authority (via sources that prefer to remain anonymous) that there have been at least five secret fundings rounds in Vietnam recently. So don’t lose hope, Vietnam – your startup ecosystem is still going strong and failure is the surest sign of maturity.

Domain name marketplace GoDaddy filed for an initial public offering to raise US$100 million early this week. This US-based internet domain registrar and web hosting company has been stepping up its India operations in recent months. GoDaddy ads have been flooding TV channels with offers to facilitate online businesses. India is already its largest international base outside the US and more action is expected with a fresh infusion of funds.

GoDaddy entered India two years ago and found the country primed for its services. India has a huge small- and medium-sized business (SMB) market base, which at 47 million is second only to China’s 50 million. Most of them have yet to get online.

Yes, the opportunities in India are enormous, but the challenges are unique, too. Former Microsoft executive Rajiv Sodhi, the managing director of GoDaddy India, explains to Tech in Asia just how different GoDaddy’s experience has been here.

Clueless clients

India’s domain market is nascent compared to mature internet markets like the US. Domain penetration here is just two percent while it stands at 20 percent in the US. The number of internet users in India is climbing by leaps and bounds, but the commercial market at large hasn’t yet woken up to the possibilities of the internet.

Consider this for starters: out of India’s 47 million SMBs, just 1.4 million have email access, and 1.3 million are online through aggregators or listing services, according to Zinnov Research. The rest are still out of the web, and a huge portion of them are possibly just itching to come online – if only somebody would show them how. That’s the market GoDaddy intends to tap.

“What we have noticed here is that the awareness about how to get your business online and the benefits of it is very low in India. A majority of businesses here still don’t realize that they are at a disadvantage if they aren’t online. So they are skeptical about whether or not to make a domain investment,” Sodhi says. Educating the market is first on the GoDaddy India agenda, both through advertisements and direct engagement with potential customers to understand their needs.

Parallels SMB cloud insights for India show that the internet-enabling business is growing fast – from US$216 million in 2012 to US$339 million in 2013. This includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), hosted communication and collaboration, web presence, web applications, and business applications. It’s expected to grow even faster this year.

Do-it-for-me market

Currently, the online presence of SMBs in India is limited to about 520,000 websites. According to Sodhi, India is essentially a “do-it-for-me market.” He says, “Companies here want to go online but want someone else to do everything for them. This opens up a lot of opportunities for solution providers like domainers, web development companies, and resellers.”

So the company came up with a two-pronged India strategy.

• Popularise the domain culture in India by educating people on domains as a great business proposition as well as create awareness among resellers on how they can use domains to generate new revenue streams.
• 24/7 customer support through a free helpline. “Most of the Indian customers require hand-holding as they are first-timers in the space,” Sodhi explains.

GoDaddy has therefore introduced an “Office 365 Web Hosting” entry plan localized for India, which they say is tailored for small and medium businesses and startups that are price conscious. The company is also offering bandwidth protection in India.

Rajiv Sodhi, managing director. GoDaddy India

Dot com is still gold standard but …

Sodhi says the launch of new gTLDs (generic top-level domains) like .guru, .tech, .photography, and so on has begun to impact the web hosting industry in India a big way. He cites the example of Suvidhaa Infoserve (SIPL), a payment and remittance company which recently bought Suvidhaa.com, a premium domain name, through GoDaddy. Besides the dot com, SIPL registered 80 other domains, including a dot mobi extension to complement their mobile strategy. The company redirects traffic from most of its registered domains to their dot com. Suvidhaa does not want to disclose how much they paid for it, but founder Paresh Rajde says the premium domain gives his company “greater marketing potential to build a memorable online brand.”

Whether it’s GoDaddy or other established players in the field like Verisign, AllDomains, Innerwise, Dynadot and DotEarth, or even startups like Axsiom, to crack this space in India, they need to do the following:

• Invest in marketing. Evangelize the market and gain mindshare. This is to create awareness on the benefits of going online as well as to explain their offerings in detail to the clients.
• Focus on product or service localization. Get customer stickiness and trust by offering great support.

(Top image via Flickr user Martin Kreyness)

Walmart (NYSE:WMT) will launch a business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce site in Lucknow and Hyderabad in the first week of July, Reuters reports today.

Krish Iyer, India Walmart president, told Reuters that sales through the firm’s ecommerce service will be available only to its trader members, who are owners of small businesses that purchase from the company’s Best Price Modern Wholesale stores across India. That could change later once India relaxes regulations on foreign firms involved in ecommerce, allowing Walmart to open its estore to all consumers.

The company will be focusing its new ecommerce venture just on Lucknow and Hyderabad in the first six months, but is planning to roll out the service to other cities later.

Walmart is the world’s largest public corporation, the largest retailer, and the biggest private employer with over two million employees in 2014, according to the Fortune Global 500 list. The firm has over 11,000 stores in 27 countries, under 55 different names.

In April, Walmart paid about $234 million in debt related to the purchase of a stake in its Indian joint venture with Bharti Enterprises, which the US retailer ended in October last year. Walmart is now going it alone in India with its wholesale business.

With this, the Indian ecommerce space got a lot more crowded.

(Top image via Walmart Corporate)

Two steps forward and one step back is how we would describe Asia’s tech scene of late. Here are all our biggest stories from the past week.

1. In Singapore, sites like Airbnb turn housing into a battleground

Short-term rentals aren’t going away anytime soon. As such, the Singapore government needs to find a middle ground to deal with sites like Airbnb.

2. aCommerce just raised one of Southeast Asia’s largest series A rounds

This investment is the largest series A for a Thailand-originated venture and one of the largest in Southeast Asia to date.

3. Alibaba acquires UCWeb in ‘biggest Chinese internet merger in history’

The deal exceeds Baidu’s US$1.9 billion acquisition of 91 Wireless in August 2013.

4. Canadian founder of MySquar, Myanmar’s up and coming social network, claims she was ousted in ‘hostile takeover’

She claims the events unfolded without warning, one day after she spoke publicly at Startup Asia Singapore about Myanmar’s internet population.

5. Despite money in the bank and 500 Startups funding, Vietnam’s Greengar shuts down

Greengar’s undoing was that its apps didn’t have serious business models behind them.

Lists

1. 12 tools for the modern web designer

Here are a few of the best web design tools that are easy to use and powerful.

2. 5 hacks every startup founder should know when recruiting key people

As your own boss, the startup founder can do a lot to recruit key personnel that a corporate HR manager or recruitment specialist cannot do.

3. Never made a profit? Don’t worry. Here are 5 US-listed Chinese tech companies that haven’t, either

In China, some of the biggest listed tech companies still aren’t turning profits, instead emphasizing investments, R&D, marketing, and, of course, user acquisition.

Features

1. This startup created a truly Asian solution for mobile payments, now claims largest client base in the region

Soft Space’s core product is a mobile point of sale (mPOS) platform for card payments.

2. Why Uber will fail in Jakarta, and why it won’t

Demand for Uber in Indonesia appears to be picking up. Yet the country could also be one of the hardest for the company to expand into.

For other ways of reading us, perhaps try our tailored RSS feeds, or find us within Flipboard.

Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, Zhaopin, Qihoo, and Yongche continue their march overseas. Read on to find out what the top Chinese tech stories were last week.

1. 11 Main, Alibaba’s first consumer-facing ecommerce site in the US, launches in beta

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.

2. With new partnership, Tesla set to build 40 Supercharger stations across China

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has just three Supercharger stations in China right now where its electric cars can juice up. But Tesla has confirmed today that it’s all set to build 40 Superchargers in China thanks to a new partnership with two of China’s biggest retail and real estate companies.

3. Alibaba teams up with China Post to make nationwide 24-hour delivery a reality

China Post is the country’s biggest postal service, and has offices pretty much everywhere, including rural areas.

4. China’s biggest job search site Zhaopin debuts on US stock market

The fresh stock performed well, opening at $14.51, rising 16 percent to US$15.67 by midday, and settling to $14.65 at the closing bell.

5. After building a Chinese web empire, Qihoo looks to new markets in developing nations

It’s not just Baidu, China’s top search engine company, that’s looking to developing nations for new market opportunities with hundreds of millions of first-time netizens.

6. China’s top limo app set to expand overseas, wants to challenge Uber in the US

Chinese startup Yongche, which is China’s top on-demand car site, is set to launch in San Francisco and New York.

7. Jack Ma talked him into it: all the dirt on Alibaba’s acquisition of UCWeb

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.

8. Gong Haiyan: plain jane factory worker to founder of China’s biggest dating site

Gong Haiyan is one of the most celebrated female tech entrepreneurs in China, having successfully founded Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE), China’s answer to Match.com, back in 2003.

9. This Chinese app puts Whisper in the workplace, helping white-collar workers dish the dirt

Tusi (or “toast” in English) is an app that’s already broadcasting some dark secrets from big-name Chinese companies.

10. Never made a profit? Don’t worry. Here are 5 US-listed Chinese tech companies that haven’t, either

Here are five of China’s biggest listed tech companies that, to date, haven’t made a dime.

11. A look inside Zhihu, China’s answer to Quora

Zhihu is China’s biggest question-and-answer-style knowledge base, and works very similar to the US-based Quora.

12. Tencent wipes out millions of prostitution, porn, and fraudulent WeChat accounts

Tencent (HKG:0700)has closed several million WeChat accounts in a campaign against cybercrime.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you might like to subscribe to our China RSS feed.

This article was generated with the help of Listmaker, an open-source tool for creating list articles.

Here’s our newest round-up of the featured startups on our site this week. If you have startup tips or story suggestions, feel free to email us or tell us about your startup on this form. Any juicy tech news tips go here. Enjoy this week’s list!

1. Synclogue | Japan

Tokyo-based Synclogue is an app that allows Windows users to sync applications (and their respective settings) across multiple computers, and is officially launching an English version of its service this week. The app syncs Windows apps across multiple PCs without the user having to tweak settings each time they install.

2. Beacon-In | Singapore

Singapore-based Beacon-In is a service for retailers and brands to reach out to passersby via iBeacons. 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.

3. MobileAds | Malaysia

Penang-based rich media mobile ad creator startup, MobileAds (previously known as RichMobileAds) has a received an undisclosed strategic investment from Seattle-headquartered HasOffers that is supposedly round to a series A. The whole concept of MobileAds is to turn the ad space into “mini websites within websites”, so that visitors don’t have to click their way out of their current websites to access the content. And the perk is that it’s for entry-level advertisers, publishers, or bloggers who can’t hire expensive agencies but still want to offer nice banners for their clients.

4. The French Cellar | Singapore

Founded last October, The French Cellar is a Singapore-based online subscription service for wine. Members have a choice of two top-notch French wines every month, which they can pick from a selection carefully curated by sommelier Nicolas Rebut, who was the former Chef Sommelier at two 3-star Michelin restaurants. Earlier this year, the startup undisclosed investment from Kyosei Ventures. Now, just three months later, ESW Manage has announced a seven-figure amount in series A funding to acquire a 20 percent stake in the company.

5. Freshdesk | India

Founded in late 2010, India-based Freshdesk aims to provide the best customer support platform in the cloud, specifically for small and medium businesses (SMBs). The startup has raised a series D round of funding led by Tiger Global, which brings its total investment to US$44 million. Of particular interest is the participation of Google Capital – one of the two VC arms of the search giant.

This makes Freshdesk the first Indian company to get backing from Google Capital, which has only five other companies in its portfolio. Accel Partners also participated in this round.

6. Social Recruiting | Japan

Social Recruiting, a Tokyo-based startup that claims to be Japan’s number one social recruiting service that 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. The startup revealed that it has received series A funding from domestic VC Global Brain.

7. aCommerce | Thailand

Founded in June 2013, aCommerce is solving a major pain point in ecommerce logistics and backend fulfillment, and is helping to accelerate ecommerce market growth across Southeast Asia.

The Thailand-based ecommerce service provider has just closed its series A venture capital round of US$10.7 million. Organized by its founding investor, Ardent Capital, the round was led by Bangkok-based Inspire Ventures with participation from NTT Docomo, Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia Limited, Sinar Mas Indonesia, Asia Pacific Digital, CyberAgent Ventures, JL Capital, strategic angel investors, and key executive staff.

8. Soft Space | Malaysia

Launched in January 2013, Soft Space’s created a truly Asian solution for mobile payments and its core product is a mobile point of sale (mPOS) platform for card payments. This solution allows merchants to accept card payments through their mobile devices, at a price that is far cheaper than a traditional POS system would cost.

9. Zhihu | China

Launched in 2011, Zhihu is China’s biggest question-and-answer-style knowledge base, and works very similar to the US-based Quora. It received a US$7 million series A round in October 2011 from Innovation Works and Qiming Ventures and at least one more undisclosed round.

10. FashionandYou | India

Specializing in men’s and women’s clothing, accessories, and home decor, India flash sales startup FashionAndYou offers 15 new daily sales wherein users get the chance to buy items from top brands at discounted prices. The startup raised $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Smile Group, Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Nokia Growth Partners.

11. Hijabenka | Indonesia

Indonesian fashion ecommerce site Hijabenka, which officially hard launched last week, looks similar to its sister company – Berrybenka. 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.

Startup lists

12 – 15. Here are the 4 graduate startups from Indosat’s first ever Ideabox

16 – 26. 11 mobile apps that make commuting easier in Indonesia’s biggest cities

Related startup stories

• 16 startup funding rounds in Asia last week

• 5 hacks every startup founder should know when recruiting key people

• Foodpanda continues Asian expansion, brings online food delivery service to the Philippines

• Gong Haiyan: plain jane factory worker to founder of China’s biggest dating site

• These 7 US startups show that your business can survive in China

• Earning the halo: How to build relationships with angel investors, even when they won’t invest in you

• Canadian founder of MySquar, Myanmar’s up and coming social network, claims she was ousted in ‘hostile takeover’

• In Singapore, sites like Airbnb turn housing into a battleground

• Dealing with entrepreneur depression the Asian way

• Softbank to invest $20 million in startups in the Philippines
  

• China’s top limo app set to expand overseas, wants to challenge Uber in the US

• Despite money in the bank and 500 Startups funding, Vietnam’s Greengar shuts down

• QuitBit is a smart lighter that helped its founder quit smoking, and it’s proving popular in Singapore

• A/B testing startup Splitforce raises seed round, relocates from Beijing to New York

We’re gearing up to bring you yet another round of our signature conference series with Startup Asia Tokyo 2014, happening 3 – 4 September 2014.

If you’re an entrepreneur, investor, developer or just someone looking to meet and learn from the speakers and companies, get your tickets now.
From now till July 3 2014, enjoy 20% off conference passes with discount code ‘earlybird’.

Read here for tips on where to eat, sleep, and stay while you are in town for Startup Asia Tokyo.

See you there!

Like RSS? There’s always our Asia startups RSS feed!

You guys might have noticed last week a lot more about Indian startups on Tech in Asia, and that’s because we have a new addition to our family – Malavika Velayanikal.

Here are eight lucky startups that got funding recently – including one of the largest rounds of funding in Southeast Asia to date for aCommerce.

1. FashionAndYou | India

India’s flash sales startup FashionAndYou has raised $10 million in funding from new and existing investors. This includes Sequoia Capital, Smile Group, Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and Nokia Growth Partners.

This comes a lengthy two and half years after FashionAndYou raised $40 million in series B funding, on top of the $8 million it attracted in 2010. This fresh funding goes into strengthening the estore’s technology, attracting more customers, and increasing sales.

2. Splitforce | China

Beijing-based Splitforce has raised its first seed funding round from SOS Ventures and a group of angel investors. Besides a fresh investment of US$150,000, founder Zac Aghion also announced a suite of new features.

3. MobileAds | Malaysia

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

4. Social Recruiting | Japan

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.

5. aCommerce | Thailand

Thailand-based ecommerce service provider aCommerce has closed its series A venture capital round of US$10.7 million. Organized by its founding investor, Ardent Capital, the round was led by Bangkok-based Inspire Ventures with participation from NTT Docomo, Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia Limited, Sinar Mas Indonesia, Asia Pacific Digital, CyberAgent Ventures, JL Capital, strategic angel investors, and key executive staff.

6. Freshdesk | India

Helpdesk software company Freshdesk – an Indian startup that quickly scaled up to rub shoulders with the global leaders in its domain – has raised US$31 million in a series D round of funding led by Tiger Global, which brings its total investment to US$44 million.

Of particular interest is the participation of Google Capital – one of the two VC arms of the search giant. This makes Freshdesk the first Indian company to get backing from Google Capital, which has only five other companies in its portfolio. Accel Partners also participated in this round.

7. ChinaNetCloud | China

ChinaNetCloud, an internet operations managed services provider, revealed that ChinaCache (Nasdaq:CCIH) has invested in the company as part of their ongoing partnership in internet operations and cloud services.

8. Touchtalent | India

Touchtalent, India’s social networking site and platform for artists to sell their work, has raised US$700,000 from SAIF and 15 other angel investors.