One of China’s top Airbnb-like sites, Xiaozhu, has secured US$15 million in series B funding to help it grow. It comes nearly 18 months after its series A round, which was worth nearly US$10 million.

Xiaozhu (meaning “little piggy” in Chinese) claims to have 2.6 million rooms listed in about 160 cities across China. That’s up from coverage of just 13 cities when we last wrote about the site in January 2013. It seems to focus on the low end of the travel market, with a number of cheap places featuring very basic rooms and even dorm-style bunk beds.

The lack of nice homes – what you’d think of as holiday homes – on the site might point to a broader issue with short-term rentals in China: a lack of trust on the part of landlords.

The homegrown market leader for short-term travel rentals in China is Tujia, which first got series A funding way back in early 2012 and then series B a year later. Tujia seems to be doing much better at attracting owners of quality homes onto the service, and most of the listed properties are mid to high-end.

Xiaozhu is also up against the equally wacky named Mayi (meaning “ants” in Chinese), which also goes for the low end of the market.

Xiaozhu’s newest funding is from Legend Capital and existing investor Morningside Ventures.

(Source: Sohu IT – article in Chinese)

For young, single men like this writer, managing photos and media is a cinch. The few photos I take on my iPhone are easily imported over to my MacBook Air, and any other image or video files are usually located on Dropbox, or within two or three folders in my computer’s finder. With a few different clouds and my external hard drive, I’ve no need to spend more money for extra space

But for tech-loving families, like the one that resides in Ashok Jaiswal’s home in Hong Kong, managing photos can be a pain. With relatives all using different devices and different cloud storage services, saving and sharing pictures from last week’s birthday party typically involves some coordination and communication – questions like “Do you have Dropbox?” and “Can you send them to me on WhatsApp?” Monthly subscription fees for extra cloud space baloon quickly.

The clutter resulting from different clouds and different devices led Jairol to design and build Ezeecube, a media-oriented storage device for the home that’s truly cross-platform. After launching the startup last February the Ezeecube team has received a seed investment of US$250,000 from Bigcolors and Big Bloom, two Hong Kong-based early-stage funds, and is launching a campaign on Indiegogo to help finance the prototype’s manufacture.

Ezeecube is a cigar box-sized slab that holds 1TB of storage. Built off of the open source XBMC media player software, the corresponding Ezeecube app for iOS and Android automatically syncs each user’s photos to the Ezeecube home cloud, where they then remain accessible to all other registered devices. Using patent-pending algorithms, Ezeecube deletes duplicate files and organizes photos by face. For those who want more storage space, or want to expand the range of files supported by Ezeecube, stackable drives can be purchased and placed right on top of the initial Ezeecube slab.

Jaiswal claims that Ezeecube marks the first truly cross-platform photo storage option of its kind. Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud – the two best-known providers of plain Jane cloud storage – all charge money for extra storage space, and Google and Apple optimize their services’ experience for their respective ecosystems. They’re also not particularly well-suited for replacing the bound photo albums of old. “These services are designed for file-sharing, in particular, short-term file sharing,” says Jaiswal. “They’re not designed for multimedia content, sorting that content, or long-term photo storage.”

Another potential competitor for Ezeecube is QVIVO, a four-year-old startup that also calls Hong Kong its home. QVIVO’s XBMC-based software maintains a movies-and-music focus and charges users US$10 a month for access to its own cloud. Ezeecube, meanwhile, emphasizes photos, and will charge consumers US$299 for their own 1TB home cloud.

While Ezeecube is technically a piece of software, Jaiswal is a media software guy through and through. After stints working at Wasp3D, and India-based maker of SaaS products for broadcast TV stations, and Muvee, a Singapore-based maker of video editing software, Jaiswal picked up an MBA at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and landed a gig at Goldman Sachs.

Jaiswal says the idea for Ezeecube came out his unhappiness with current options for saving photos of his daughter, with no service prioritizing efficiency and security.

We have a one and a half year old daughter. Everybody these days takes photos using their smartphones, and we take a lot of photos of our daughter. I lost my phone once so I lost all the photos on it, and my wife and her mother also struggle with saving images on their phones because they run out of storage quickly. Google and iCloud don’t come for free – after 5G you have to pay a lot of money, up to US$50 a month. Privacy is another issue. We take a lot of photos we hope to keep within the family, so if my wife’s mother isn’t careful then all of a sudden those photos could be all over the internet.

Ezeecube aims to raise US$75,000 on Indiegogo by July 4.

Before the internet, searching for statistical data meant a trip to the local library and hours of digging through printed data, all just to find something as simple as university rankings or the population of your city. Now, access to that kind of information is only a click away – or so it seems. Unfortunately, as anyone who’s written a term paper is certainly aware, the numbers returned by a Google search aren’t always accurate or even recent.

Graph, a new service created by Tokyo-based startup The Coco, hopes to fix that by going straight to the source – governments and corporations. Type a search term and Graph instantly generates – you guessed it – a graph (the user can choose between pie, bar, line, and dot graphs) with selectable timeframes and parameters.

Want to know the population of Japan? Graph will give you a range from 1935 until the most recent census in 2013. Hovering your mouse over an individual bar reveals the exact number for that year, the date it was published, and the source (in this case, the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). A sidebar allows you to break the numbers down by age, sex, and prefecture. A search for annual family budgets, on the other hand, can be broken down by actual products and services, i.e. how much families spend each year on rice or education.

“I want to make the internet more credible,” Shunsuke Takahashi, founder, lead developer, and CEO of The Coco says. “Why is it so hard to believe the information on the internet? You hear opinions, but not necessarily concrete statistics. Like someone writes, ‘This university is good,’ but there’s no data on how many students quit or transfer each year. For things like restaurant reviews, opinion is good. But for a life event, like choosing which school to attend or where to live – you need concrete information to think about.”

Takahashi recently graduated from startup accelerator Movida Japan’s fifth batch, which provided him with 5 million yen (US$49,000) to get the ball rolling. The 23-year-old entrepreneur dropped out of Japan’s prestigious Keio University, where he had been a physics major, to pursue Graph full time.

Physics explains all of the things happening in the world in a logical way. I still love physics, but sometimes it takes a lifetime to explain the smallest thing. When I was a student, seeing companies like Facebook, I realized that a good business can also change the world – and much faster.

Growing Graph and getting people to pay for it

Graph is Japan-specific at the moment, with current data sourced entirely from the Japanese government, but Takahashi hopes to push the service globally while beefing it up with corporate and social figures. Once governments are on board with sharing their statistics, Takahashi says that he will monetize the service by charging users to download graph files.

“Then we’d consider doing limited ventures with big companies,” adds Takahashi. “We could essentially buy the data from them. Our biggest challenge, at this point, is marketing.”

One revenue sharing outlet could be targeted ads. If someone wants to know how many Japanese citizens live in Thailand, for example, Takahashi explains that advertisements for cheap airfare to Bangkok could be placed somewhere on the screen.

A beta version of Graph went live last month, but Takahashi decided to shut it down until he could incorporate a greater amount of searchable data. He’s since designed a way of automating the collection of government statistics and will re-launch the site by the end of this month.

At present, Graph consists of Takahashi (pictured below, left), his head of marketing, and two interns. Takahashi hopes to raise around 30 million yen (US$295,000) for the startup’s series A round and is currently fundraising.

3Doodler, a seemingly magical pen that draws 3D shapes in the air using plastic ink, amazed the world with its simple idea. It raised US$2.3 million on Kickstarter, smashing its goal of US$30,000.

Just when you think upstaging 3Doodler is impossible, CreoPop, an upstart coming from Singapore, has a legitimate shot. The startup is fundraising on Indiegogo, and it’s well on its way to meeting its goal many times over.

Fantastic as 3Doodler sounds, it’s unsafe for children. Melting plastic emits an unpleasant smell, and the pen’s tip, which heats up to 270 degrees Celsius (over 500 degree Fahrenheit), could burn unsuspecting kids.

CreoPop works differently. Its ink, a light-sensitive resin, solidifies at room temperature upon contacting UV rays, which is why CreoPop calls it ‘cool ink’.

CreoPop has also promised inks with unique properties. There’s magnetic ink, ink that changes color based on temperature, aromatic ink, as well as ink that conducts electricity, stretches, or even glows in the dark.

And while 3Doodler connects to a power socket, CreoPop operates on a battery, making it ideal for appeasing bored kids on a long vacation trip. Parents would fork out US$89 for the pen and US$2 or US$3 for a cartridge, making it cheaper than the 3Doodler.

Exposure to UV rays harmful?

CreoPop’s unique concept has attracted tons of media attention, and its touted child-friendliness didn’t hurt. Yet people worry about the effects of long-term exposure to the pen’s UV light.

Andreas Birnik, CreoPop’s co-founder and marketing chief, says that the product “should be safe” for use. It’s going through US certification and will change the product before shipping if the authorities identify problems.

“Our analysis and certification are not yet complete,” says Birnik. “But we have found other devices using stronger diodes that have been certified.”

These certification papers say that the devices are safe since the eyes normally blink as a reflex after looking straight into the light. Birnik isn’t worried about long-term exposure either.

“UV light is in regular sunlight. In fact, if you leave our inks outside the capsules in daylight, they will solidify.”

CreoPop is part of HaxAsia, a hardware startup accelerator run in Singapore, Silicon Valley, and China. Startups in that program which successfully meet their crowdfunding targets will join Foxconn’s manufacturing lab where they will work with the manufacturing giant to refine the product and enter mass production.

The startup received a small five-figure grant from the Singapore government’s iJam program.

Poverty is a big problem in Indonesia. However, companies don’t find this an obstacle when reaching out to Indonesia’s wealthier citizens. Although this group is small, brands targeting them can grow if they adopt the right strategies – which is what luxury estore Reebonz is doing.

Reebonz sells bags, shoes, and accessories from famous designers. It stocks labels like Burberry, Chanel, Gucci, Hermes, and Prada. Prices range from IDR 1.1 million (US$93) to IDR 335.5 million (US$28,276), and 90 percent of its customers are women.

Reebonz began in Singapore with Samuel Lim, Daniel Lim, and Benjamin Han as founders. The company expanded to Indonesia at the end of 2011 after seeing strong demand from Indonesians for these premium products. Indonesians, after all, love to spend their weekends in Singapore to shop.

The Reebonz Indonesia team tells Tech in Asia that its localized website attracts 6,000 to 7,000 unique visitors each day and an average of 900,000 page-views a month. It has 230,000 registered users, and has an average purchase value per user in 2012 of about IDR 3.5 million (US$295) to IDR 4 million (US$337), which increased to around IDR 7.5 million (US$632) in 2013. Besides Jakarta, Reebonz also sells to Surabaya, Bali, Batam, Manado, Ambon, and Makassar.

1. Offering lower prices

Yanly Riky, the Reebonz Indonesia digital marketing strategist, says that its biggest competitors are boutiques and sellers on Instagram. Reebonz responds by offering prices which are 10 to 30 percent cheaper than the competition. Reebonz can do this because it buys in bulk from fashion suppliers.

2. Credit card promotions

Reebonz, together with several banks in Indonesia like ANZ, Danamon, and Standard Chartered, offers credit card and installment payment schemes as well as cash back promotions. Reebonz’s data says 60 percent of its users now pay using credit cards while the rest pay via bank transfer.

3. Joining major sales events

Reebonz takes advantage of various major sales events to reach customers who want to see the products before purchasing. The team joins offline sales events every three months or so. There are also web-based events, such as the Jakarta Online Great Sale where Reebonz will collaborate with other ecommerce players like Lazada and Berrybenka. Reebonz will give a discount of IDR 487,000 (US$41) for each product at that event.

4. Offering pre-owned products

Reebonz sells pre-owned items, and this makes it unique. It appeals to customers on tight budgets and those seeking discontinued products. Secondhand items make up less than 10 percent of Reebonz’s total sales. The pre-owned products are divided into categories based on their condition and price.

5. Online ads

Reebonz spends big bucks on Google Ads by using keywords which are valued up to IDR 10,000 (US$0.84) for each click. The method is effective: it sees a conversion rate of 20 percent from search to purchase.

Beyond the web, Reebonz also created a mobile app for iOS and Android. Currently, the app has 110,000 users in Indonesia. Reebonz’s data shows that transactions on the mobile app contributed 10 percent of Reebonz’s total revenue in 2012, and that increased to 30 percent in 2013.

Unfortunately, Reebonz requires all users to be members first before they can browse the sites. This is quite irritating to some people and might drive some new visitors away – despite the convenience of using Facebook to register. In Indonesia, Reebonz is competing against VIP Plaza and Brands Fever.

This article was first published on our Indonesian site Tech in Asia ID.

More than a year after it first ventured into Asia, popular transportation network company (TNC) Uber has finally arrived in in the fragrant harbor.

As the firm typically does when it enters new markets, Uber marked the occasion by taking two local celebrities for a spin. This time, according to a company blog post (hat-tip TNW), gal-about-town Amanda Strang and actor Carl Ng each took the passenger seat in black sedans to mark Uber’s official “soft launch” in Hong Kong.

It’s taken a long time for Uber to launch its flagship UberBlack service in the densely populated coastal city. Only 18,138 licensed taxis operate in Hong Kong, which has a resident population of 7 million people. That’s roughly comparable to the 13,000-odd taxis in the equally populous New York City, where Uber has thrived. Compared to other Asian cities, market demand for instant ground transport for passengers ought to be quite high in Hong Kong, so Uber’s late launch there comes as a surprise. We’ve yet to discover any specific factors that have delayed Uber’s arrival in Hong Kong (for what its worth, the local taxi industry looks loaded with middlemen and possibly corrupt), and perhaps none exist. Tech in Asia has reached out to Uber for more comments on this matter.

Uber is currently operating in 25 cities in Asia Pacific and 121 cities worldwide.

Editing by Steven Millward; top image via Flickr user Slack12

A couple of years back, if you were to buy a sub-$200 smartphone, you wouldn’t really get much. Performance would be terrible, build quality would have been unbearable, and the touchscreen nearly unusable. Lately, however, things have changed. With smartphones becoming the norm and component prices getting cheaper, it’s been getting easier for manufacturers to make good phones at ridiculous prices. From the $300 Nexus line to the sub-$200 Nokia Lumia 520, many phones now offer a great experience at an even greater price. The latest phone to try and take on that mantle in Indonesia is Motorola’s Moto G.

The Moto G was released in America in late 2013 to largely positive reviews. Half a year later, the phone has finally made its way to Indonesia, where the Motorola team along with members of Lazada held an official launch event on June 5. Since then we’ve been working on a hands-on review of the Moto G.

The phone is being sold exclusively online through Lazada, with the 8GB variant shipping now and the 16GB one coming in late June. The Moto G variants cost IDR 1.949 million (US$163) and IDR 2.249 million (US$189) respectively. Essentially it’s the same Moto G that launched last year in Brazil, with a few changes to adapt to the Indonesian market.

The Moto G is equipped with a 4.5-inch 720p HD LCD display, a 5MP shooter, a quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor, 1GB of RAM, and dual-SIM support. Motorola is also throwing in 50GB of Google Drive storage which is valid for two years. The back of the device is removable, and Motorola has seven different colours you can choose from, which retail for IDR 104,000 (US$8.80) each on Lazada. One thing that’s surprising is that the Indonesian model comes with a wall charger and a USB cable, whereas the ones shipped internationally only come with a cable.

Note that there’s no micro-SD card slot on this Indonesian model. The first variant of the Moto G did not have support for external storage, but last month Motorola updated the phone with SD card support. However, it is left out of the Indonesian Moto G in favour of a second SIM slot.

Feels solid

The first thing you will notice about the Moto G is the build quality. From the moment you pick it up, you’ll be convinced that this phone is worth more than its price-tag. Everything about the design of the phone, from the way it fits snugly in your hand to the comfortable soft touch material on the back, gives it a premium feel. Although the back is removable, it doesn’t really feel that way as the cover blends seamlessly with the overall aesthetic of the phone. It’s heavier than most other phones, but it isn’t the bad kind of heavy – it feels like it’s solid and well built. The size of the phone is similar to that of the iPhone 5, but because the screen is 4.5 inches and the side bezels are so slim, it feels much more immersive. Speaking of the display, it’s one of the best in its class. While it’s not 1080p HD, the 720p display comes in at 329PPI (pixels per inch) and is clear and crisp for most things. That is, when you have nothing to compare it to. Putting it side by side with the three-year-old Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which has the same resolution and a lower PPI due to its larger size, you can see that the colours on the Moto G look muted and less saturated, the blacks are more of a light gray, and when you push the brightness up to maximum everything just tends to look washed out.

Of course, for a phone to reach such a low price point, there are bound to be some compromises resulting in issues with the hardware. In this case, some are not so annoying, but others are unbearable. One of the major problems I had with the Moto G during my testing was with wi-fi. More often than not, the phone would randomly disconnect from wi-fi networks and would refuse to connect again, with the only remedy being switching off the wi-fi and then switching it on again. This could be attributed to the lower quality wi-fi chip found in the device. Another gripe about the wi-fi chip is that it doesn’t support 5GHz bands, but if you don’t know what that is, it probably doesn’t matter to you.

The phone also lacks an NFC chip, so if you use Google Wallet or any other similar services, this probably isn’t the device for you.

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

The speakers on the back of the Moto G are louder than you’d expect, especially since they’re on the back. It sounds fine for calls on the speakerphone but listening to music on the thing is painful. The sounds are tin-like and sharp, while the lows are overly distorted and the mids are nonexistent. One problem that I personally have with the phone’s design is that the headphone jack is on the top, which always causes the cable of my headphones to get in the way when I’m trying to use it.

The biggest downfall of the Moto G, however, is its camera. It may be a 5MP camera, but it doesn’t work like one. It’s slow to capture images, mostly all the colours are wrong and can never seem to focus probably. Images taken with the flash tend to be washed out and blurry, even when taken with a tripod. You’d really expect more from a 5MP camera, especially when compared to other camera’ out there like the one on the Galaxy Nexus and even older ones like the 3MP camera on the LG Optimus One.

Tiny engine, massive roar

Performance on the Moto G is stellar. That’s partly due to the quad-core Snapdragon chip and partly to Google’s emphasis on smoothness in Android 4.4 KitKat. Apps open quickly, games run well, and you can even multitask as much as you’d like. I did get some force closes here and there when running games like Dead Trigger, but for everyday tasks it just flies. It didn’t overheat at all. Loading web pages is smooth. Compared to competing offerings from Samsung and HTC, the Moto G does tasks like opening apps and loading webpages much quicker. In fact, at the Indonesian launch event, Marcus Frost, EMEA senior marketing director at Motorola, went as far as to say that in everyday tasks, the Moto G performs better than the Samsung Galaxy S4. You’d think he’s exaggerating, but it’s actually believable given that the Moto G runs stock Android, whereas the Samsung Galaxy S4 runs the Touchwiz skin, which is is a whole extra layer of weight atop Android, consuming more RAM.

It’s because of all this that battery life on the Moto G is just as great. I was able to go a whole day without having to plug in, and still have battery left over. This was with constant use, which includes four email accounts always pulling in data and constantly checking Twitter, WhatsApp, Flowdock for work, and all the other apps that I use daily. In comparison, if I used my HTC One the way I did the Moto G, it would have died in less than six hours.

Although Motorola didn’t include some of the Moto X’s most renowned features (touchless control, active notifications) in the cheaper Moto G, they did include a couple of useful apps with the phone. Motorola Assist is one that comes in handy. The app does a number of things, most notably muting your phone at night when you’re sleeping and only allowing notifications from important contacts to come in, and also scanning your calendar to know when you’re in a meeting and automatically putting your phone on vibrate.

Indonesia’s homegrown challengers

When it comes to Indonesia’s local phone-makers, there’s only one phone that stacks up to the Moto G and that is the new Smartfren Andromax V (aka the Andromax V2). The phone is priced at IDR 2.199 million (US$185) and has comparable specs to the Moto G. They both come with 720p HD displays, although the Moto G’s display will look clearer because it’s on a 4.5-inch screen, whereas the Smartfren’s pixels are stretched more thinly across a 5-inch area.

They both offer quad-core processors clocked in at 1.2GHz and have 1GB of RAM, although it’s important to note that since the Moto G is running Android 4.4 compared to Android 4.2 on the Smartfren, the Andromax V2 won’t run as smoothly and perform as well. Two areas where the Smartfren does come out as a winner, however, are in terms of the camera and disk storage. The Smartfren is equipped with an 8MP shooter on the back, which on paper should be better than the Moto G’s, especially given the disappointing results we’ve seen from the Moto G’s camera in testing. Although the Smartfren Andromax V2 only offers 8GB of internal storage, it does have an SD expansion slot, theoretically giving you up to 40GB of memory.

Our bloggers have not had a great experience with Smartfren phones in the past, such as our problematic and laggy experience with the Andromax-U last year. That sort of issue is why Motorola conceived the Moto G as a phone that’d offer smooth and satisfactory usage at a low price. Nonetheless, homegrown phone-makers across Asia are challenging the likes of Samsung, Apple, HTC, and Motorola across the region, and the Moto G faces a huge battle to persuade Indonesia’s consumers to give it a go.

Moto G conclusion

There was a time when Motorola was the dominant force in the phone market, but nowadays technology has moved so quickly that they’ve been all but forgotten. Samsung is now the major smartphone brand, with a number of homegrown Indonesian phone-makers growing in stature as they try to grow market share in the country with a wide array of cheap yet mid-range phones.

That’s why it makes sense Motorola didn’t choose to re-enter the Indonesian market with the Moto X, because its price would make it a harder sell. At the other end of the spectrum, the insanely cheap Moto E would perhaps give people the wrong impression that it’s a bargain-basement phone with major issues. The Moto G sits perfectly between the two – and in this market – in terms of price, and performs even better than most phones in higher price ranges. It’s definitely a strong entry for Motorola to get a foothold in the Indonesian market. Yes, there are compromises with the Moto G – especially that camera – but it’s the best of the inevitably compromised, affordable phones.

Chinese online pawn shop marketplace Taodangpu has raised a US$30 million series B round of funding from BlueRun Ventures, Heli Capital, and Northern Light Venture Capital, according to 36kr.

The startup runs two interconnected websites, Taodangpu.com and 51dang.com. They were both founded just one year ago and currently operate in Beijing and Shanghai.

51dang essentially functions like a peer-to-peer lending website – a fast-growing trend in China among the under-financed – except it uses pawned goods as collateral. Users can pawn jewelry, watches, precious metals, vehicles, and even real estate. Those offers are sent to 51Dang’s network of physical pawn shops, which can bid to lend money in exchange for the goods. The site narrows down the selection of pawn shops by their proximity and available funds.

Taodangpu is the online store where those goods are sold if the users can’t pay back their loans. It offers expert assessments of all the items and a seven-day return policy.

The traditional method of pawning goods requires the borrower to go to brick-and-mortar pawn shops individually. This crowdsourced method forces the shops to compete, guaranteeing the best deal for the borrower.

Taodangpu plans on using the investment to expand to more cities beyond Beijing and Shanghai. It currently has more than 1,000 pawn shops around the country on its network. No user numbers were disclosed.

(Source: 36kr)

(Update: We revised a couple of facts: CekAja’s beta launch timeline and number of transactions processed)

Indonesia could become a huge market for the insurance industry in the near future, according to Deloitte. Despite the low insurance penetration rate, Indonesia is experiencing a demographic shift where many young Indonesians are entering the workforce and joining the middle class.

Sensing an opportunity, many financial comparison sites have sprung up in Indonesia. Just last month, we wrote about seven such websites in Indonesia. CekAja.com is one of those that has jumped into the water to capture the market early.

Founded in November last year and beta launched in early May, CekAja helps Indonesians compare financial and insurance products. CekAja works with many prominent banks and insurers in Indonesia to provide extensive options for users.

They can compare a wide range of financial products such as personal loans, credit cards, deposits, and syariah, a deposit that follows Islamic principles. Other services like mortgages, vehicle financing, vehicle insurance, property insurance, life insurance, and electronics insurance will be rolled out gradually. CekAja co-founder John Patrick Ellis says:

Consumers in Indonesia have made and submitted comparisons for more than IDR 5 trillion (US$529 million) in value of banking products, and over IDR 50 billion ($5 million) in value has been created for our banking partners, all in the past 30 days of our beta launch period.

More comprehensive than the rest

CekAja provides an end-to-end service starting from a potential customer making a comparison on the website all the way to the approval or rejection of the service. That’s what separates CekAja from the pack.

To get started with CekAja, potential customers choose what products they want to compare, for example personal loans, and then fill in the form containing their basic information and contact details. If the customer decides to apply for a certain product, the CekAja team will contact him or her and send a courier to get the signature along with all required documentation. Indonesian regulation dictates that all application papers need an inked signature in order to be valid.

Once the requirements have been fulfilled, CekAja will send all documents to its bank partner for further review. Within two to four weeks, CekAja’s concierge will tell the customer whether the application has been approved and if not, what steps need to be taken.

CekAja manually screens each applicant. Because there isn’t an online database of blacklisted people in Indonesia, CekAja partners with the Indonesian Credit Card Association (AKKI) and does background checks themselves to make sure all applicants are eligible for the financial products they are applying. The team also has a customer service team with financial certification who can help answer users’ questions before submitting an application.

This is unlike other financial comparison providers, who would just refer all applications to bank partners for the latter to follow up. The partners would then need to screen applicants themselves and handle the papers. Some of the other websites lack flexible filtering criteria, and instead of providing complete information, directs users to the banks’ websites.

Battle scars to show

Ellis says that he faced no specific difficulty in implementing this product in the market aside from the hard work of convincing banks to forge a partnership with them. He also found it difficult to get good team members who have the experience, knowledge, and expertise to make this idea work.

CekAja’s team possesses plenty of relevant experience. Mountain Venture, a company builder and the investor behind CekAja, got the former co-founder and acting CTO of German financial comparison site Check24.de to join Ellis and team to create CekAja in Indonesia.

Ellis himself is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Harpoen, an augmented reality app that lets users create ‘digital graffiti’, and Mapiary, a location-based app that enables users to create custom maps for various purposes. CekAja has 15 full-time employees in Indonesia to handle the business and operational matters, and 40 full-time employees in the Philippines to cover technical development.

The startup is currently serving the Jabodetabek (Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, Bekasi) area only. Ellis says the site’s seeing promising traffic so far, and he plans to reach the rest of Indonesia by creating a cloud-based financial software. To reinforce its existence outside Jabodetabek area, CekAja will target B2B customers and they will become agents of CekAja to deliver the services.

CekAja also plans to launch a financial comparison website in the Philippines soon.

India’s largest entertainment ticketing portal just crossed the US$100 million barrier in valuation, The Economic Times reports today. Bigtree Entertainment, which owns BookMyShow, raised US$25 million from investors led by SAIF Partners, who valued the site at Rs 1000 crore (US$166 million). This is a three-fold increase in valuation from the time it last raised funds two years ago. Existing investors Accel Partners and media company Network18 also contributed.

After starting out with only movie ticketing, BookMyShow quickly expanded to cover sporting events and music concerts. Becoming the ticketing portal for the Indian Premier League (IPL) was a coup in a country where cricket is a religion. It also competed against global players in this space to bag the ticketing rights for cricket’s Twenty20 World Cup this year. The challenge was to ensure the website would not crash during huge surges in traffic, which BookMyShow managed to do – and that enhanced its reputation. Founder and CEO Ashish Hemrajani explained to YourStory:

“BookMyShow has a robust system built over many years of a deep understanding of managing user expectations. The nature of the business is around sudden peak demand and we are extremely mindful of that.”

A mobile app launched last year and that has also helped BookMyShow widen its net, boosting sales in smaller towns. The new funds will be used to further drive mobile ticket sales. “We are confident the team will continue the focus on innovation, customer service and technology,” SAIF Partners managing director Deepak Gaur says in a statement after the funding.

Hemrajani and two friends – Parikshit Dar and Rajesh Balpande – came up with the idea of Bigtree during a holiday in South Africa way back in 1999, but the dotcom bust set them back. They pivoted to the customer relation management and call centre business to ride it out, before Network18 came in with big bucks in 2007 when BookMyShow was launched. An intern developer at the company came up with the name after an internal contest. The subsequent boom in the Indian consumer internet market has taken it to the big league.

(Source: The Economic Times)

If you’re like some of us at Tech In Asia, you’re staying up late into the night (or early morning) to catch a glimpse of amazing goals from folks like the now infamous Robin Van Persie. In the midst of this year’s World Cup, global tech companies are finding ways to capitalize on soccer fever. Facebook featured last night’s matches on its new Trending feature, Twitter has dedicated a hashtag and column, and even Google’s been sporting a World Cup doodle. From the little town of Da Nang, off of the central coast of Vietnam, comes friendly betting startup Sepp.com.

The duo of co-founders, Anders Palm and Uyen Vu, formerly founded and sold Eat.vn to VC Corp in 2012. They’ve since quit VC Corp and decided to continue their serial entrepreneur journey with Sepp.com. Anders, originally from Sweden, who I personally met for the first time watching the World Cup at a bar in Ho Chi Minh city four years ago, has been living in Vietnam for more than seven years along with his co-founder Uyen Vu. He’s loved soccer ever since he was a kid, so Sepp.com was a natural pet project for the team to take on for the last few months in the runner up to the World Cup after resigning from VC Corp.

The basic premise of the product is that you can bet on the next ten games at the World Cup. Depending on whether your team wins, loses, or draws, you’ll gain (or lose) points. The point system will determine if you are good at predicting matches or not. The main point is that you get to challenge your friends and colleagues without the risk of losing money on a real gamble.

Up til now, Palm and Vu have been focused on building products for the local Vietnamese market. That includes Eat.vn and other web services like Expat.vn, which provides services to expats living in Vietnam. Sepp.com is their first effort into the global market:

I found that soccer is one of the best connectors of people in the world and I wanted to build my first startup targeting a global audience. I’ve always played soccer games online to stay in touch with friends back home, but these have been local Swedish games. I wanted to build something where people could compete with soccer prediction skills independent of which language they speak and where they are located.

Palm hopes that the World Cup will only be the first launch – additional matches, perhaps even full seasons, from a variety of international leagues will be added in the future. The World Cup provides a clear format of ten matches each week, but this will be updated to fit the intricacies of other leagues. Palm is looking to monetize Sepp.com with advertisements and sponsorships just like other soccer-related products. Eventually, he may add some kind of real gambling component that puts actual money at stake.

Our mission is to become the de facto standard measurement for how good you are at predicting soccer. The Sepp score ranges from zero to 100 and is based on how well you predict matches week by week, everyone starts at 50. It is a bit like Klout for soccer predictions.

So far, the platform has over 1,000 users hailing from 24 countries since a soft launch on the week of the World Cup. The company is also looking at improving the mobile side, anticipating that people will use their mobile as a second screen while watching the game.

If you’d like to try your hand at predicting games on Sepp.com, click here.

Momo, the popular Chinese flirting app that recently crossed the 100 million download mark, has announced that it will shut down its international, English-language sister app on July 1st.

According to The Next Web, users of the international Momo received a message today informing them that the current app – which is an entirely separate app, sporting a slightly different icon than its Chinese counterpart –  will be “discontinued” at the start of next month. However, the company said it is currently developing a “brand new product,” indicating that the startup isn’t giving up on cracking international markets just yet. The full text reads:

Dear user, thank you for staying with Momo. We have made a tough decision to discontinue this version on July 1st, 2014. We want to take the chance to thank you for always being there for us: you have been the driving force behind our mission to change the way people connect. Now we’re working on a brand new product featuring our exciting learnings along the way! It will be ready soon. We’re here to thank you again and answer any questions that you might have. Please do not hesitate to reach out at feedback@immomo.com

Momo launched its international app in October 2012. At the time, mobile messaging was still hot-and-getting-hotter. Momo claimed to have 10 million users on its domestic Chinese app, 10 percent of whom resided abroad. When our colleague in Singapore took the international version for a test drive, he noted that the app didn’t do much to “internationalize” beyond building out an English-language interface. Since the two apps shared the same database of users, it’s possible that the few people outside of China who did download the international Momo quickly got turned off by the all-too-visible mass of Chinese users.

Following its international launch, Momo evolved to become a respectable supplement to WeChat (or Weixin) in China. As it grew its user base, it began selling stickers, VIP tiers, and games as a means to bring in revenue. But it’s international version never received updates for these in-app purchases, and it currently sports a dated-looking iOS 6 user interface.

Momo is reportedly planning an IPO, which ought to signal that its team will be be active for a while, and might help the company raise enough cash to market abroad more aggressively.

Momo isn’t the only Chinese social app that has struggled to find traction beyond the Middle Kingdom. Tencent’s WeChat has accumulated 100 million registered users outside of China, but given Tencent’s global marketing push and its reluctance to disclose further regional breakdowns, we’re bearish on its prospects for dominating in any of its international markets. Some Chinese apps have crossed the Pacific (or traversed through Central Asia) successfully, however. Goofy photo app MomentCam went viral all over the world, while Chengdu-based Camera 360 claims that half of its 250 million registered users reside outside of China. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is: network effects are hard to duplicate from the top-down, so apps that achieve their utility from said network effects can kill in one market and bomb in another.

We’ve reached out to the Momo team for comments on these developments and will update this piece if we hear back.

(Source: The Next Web)

Xiaomi VP Hugo Barra’s visit to the Philippines last week signalled the Chinese smartphone maker’s imminent arrival in the country. Now Xiaomi has revealed that 3,000 Mi3 smartphones will be on sale in the country on June 26 at 12 noon.

The Mi3 16 GB smartphones will be sold at Php 10,599 (US$241), which is lower than Barra’s earlier estimate of Php 12,000 (US$272). That’s likely due to Xiaomi lowering the cost of the Mi3 in China, where it costs RMB 1,499 (US$240) for the 16GB version. Customers can purchase the phone through Xiaomi’s local partner, Lazada Philippines. This announcement was made through the Mi Philippines Facebook page.

Unlike other smartphone brands, Xiaomi is known for its flash sales, in which it sells phones in batches. It even does that in new markets outside China. Devices usually sell out in just a few minutes. In Hong Kong, the startup company sold 10,000 HongMi phones in only 36 seconds – its fastest overseas sale to date. Its slowest sell out is in Malaysia where it sold 4,000 Mi3 phones in 17 minutes.

See: 4 reasons why Asian tech companies are using flash sales to sell their stuff

As the Philippines is the fastest growing nation in smartphone uptake, many expect a quick sell-out for its first batch.

Following the Philippines, Xiaomi is also set to expand in Indonesia, Thailand and India.

The possibility of failure is an unfortunate fact of life for those who decide to take the road less traveled and found or join a startup. Today marked Failcon’s first event in Japan – a country which generally finds little merit in failure. Organized by Tokyo-based seed accelerator Open Network Lab, Failcon Japan featured talks by domestic entrepreneurs and a keynote address by ex-Digg CEO Jay Adelson.

Tech in Asia rounded up the 5 most useful failure hacks shared by Failcon Japan presenters to give you insight on how to bounce back from failure – or avoid it altogether.

When choosing a co-founder, make sure your expectations align

Ian Mendiola, co-founder and CEO of news reader app Umano, told the audience about his personal struggle with finding the best co-founder. His best advice? Avoid misaligned expectations. One of Mendiola’s previous co-founders was focused on one thing: exiting the company as quickly as possible. The result? They were unable to move the company forward, only treading water and losing money. After the company failed, Mendiola was left to regroup.

“It was like a breakup, I was sitting at home wondering where it all went wrong,” Mendiola said. “You just have to be in it for the same reasons.”

Pay attention to context

Jay Adelson, former CEO of social news aggregator Digg, revisited its near-acquisition by Google in 2008. In an agonizing example of “so close, yet so far,” Digg and Google had reached an understanding for a US$200 million acquisition. Mere hours before the money was to be transferred into Digg’s accounts, Google pulled out of the deal. Still reeling from the shock, three days later Digg had to acknowledge an even grimmer reality – Lehman Brothers had collapsed, taking the stock market and the venture capital market with it.

Adelson told the audience to not dwell on what could have been and stressed the importance of gut instinct.

“The lesson is that context is everything,” he said. “What’s happening around you is what matters – all these platitudes and lessons are important, but perspective is the most important. Stick to you gut, look at the data, look at the market, then look at your company and make the decision.”

Open communication makes a happy office

Office politics must be avoided at all costs, said Koichiro Yoshida, CEO of Crowdworks, a crowdsourcing solution service. As a general rule, one-on-one emailing is not allowed at Crowdworks. Yoshida judges his success at maintaining a positive office environment using a simple metric – If the company is bringing in about thirty people a month, then it should lose no more than 25 people a year.

Get a proper office

Kensuke Tsuchiya, CEO of GoodPatch, was trying to cut costs by using a virtual office to stay in touch with his team. He might have been saving money, but the company wasn’t making enough sales. Looking back, he’s happy to have later taken a friend’s advice to move into a physical office. Renting it took a good chunk of the company’s money but, in face-to-face meeting obsessed Japan, it was essential for giving it legitimacy when dealing with banks and more traditionally-minded clients.

Find a mentor

Paul Chapman, CEO of MoneyTree stressed the need for a good mentor – a point that was also touched on by other Failcon Japan speakers. Chapman recommended searching “far and wide” for the right mentor instead of settling on the first person that comes to mind. Mentors can take many forms, he added, so it is important to keep an open mind for all possible sources of advice and inspiration.

Open Network Lab president Tomoya Sasaki.

Accepting failure in Japan

Having Failcon in Japan is an excellent sign of a maturing domestic startup market. As Open Network Lab CEO Tomoya Sasaki told Tech in Asia, he wanted to put on this type of event after seeing the positive effects of having startups in their own accelerator share their struggles with each other. After meeting Failcon founder Cass Phillips by chance in San Francisco, he saw an opportunity to bring some Silicon Valley culture back to Japan. “With this sort of event, if there are people who will share their failures in public, then maybe Japanese culture can change,” he said. Judging by the packed room, his plan is being well received.

Dr. Lai Kok Fung is currently CEO of BuzzCity, a Singapore-based multinational company specialized in mobile advertising. He is also adjunct professor in the school of computing at the National University of Singapore. He started his career as an applied researcher in the Information Technology Institute, a now-defunct applied research institute funded by the government of Singapore. His writings on innovation are collected in a blog titled Innovation.

Singapore’s skyline is a symbol of the country’s prowess as a financial center.

I wrote several articles recently on how government monopolies in media and telecommunications are stifling innovation in Singapore’s startup ecosystem. One of my respected mentors disagreed with me, pointing out the cutting-edge innovations in Singapore’s wealth management clusters.

According to data from WealthInsight, Singapore’s wealth management industry grew 22 percent in 2012 to S$1.63 trillion (US$1.29 trillion).  Singapore, a millionaire haven for years, could dislodge Switzerland as the wealth management capital of the world by 2020.

This is caused by both push and pull factors. Swiss private banks have steadily lost European clientele in recent years as a clampdown on tax dodging puts pressure on banking secrecy, long the bedrock of its private banks. Singapore’s rise, on the other hand, is fueled by rapid growth of wealth in China, India, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets. The rise attracts controversy; Singapore supposedly practices ‘selective transparency’ by offering a variety of secrecy facilities, tax-avoidance and evasion opportunities to select clientele.

Wealth management, in turn, is supported by key clusters in security (the Singapore Armed Forces and police force), entertainment (integrated resorts, Formula One), real estate, air travel, legal, and medical. Witness the two integrated resorts, the world’s first night Formula One circuit, Changi Airport, and Marina Bay. At first glance, these may appear to be different from innovations like WhatsApp. However, they all require strategic discipline and out-of-the-box thinking.

Singapore does spend a few billion dollars every year on research and entrepreneurism. The amount is not small by any means, but it just does not appear to be the country’s core focus. Just observe where the top leaderships and trusted lieutenants spend most of their time (GIC, Temasek, SAF, Home Team), and compare this to the ranking of VIPs tasked to officiate startup events. While many government agencies are keen to promote entrepreneurism, the top management almost never cross over from GLCs or statutory boards to run startups.

As a result, most of our top talents have been sucked into the wealth management clusters. This is not a bad or wrong outcome since it is our core business.

“I don’t want that to be my marketing line”

While seldom shying away from trumpeting its wins to the world, Singapore is uncharacteristically modest in its wealth management achievements. In a dialogue with DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong responded to the question of whether Singapore could soon overtake Switzerland as the top wealth center. He said, “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t want that to be my marketing line”. He continued, quoted by The Straits Times, “We are quite happy to continue our way quietly in the world.”

There’s another reason: politics. People are concerned about worsening income inequality and concentration of wealth, making it politically unpalatable to boast about success in wealth management.

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement in many countries targets social and economic inequality as well as greed from the financial services sector. Singapore must be keen to avoid similar demonstrations, which will surely jeopardize its standing as a calm and stable oasis amidst the relative chaos of Southeast Asia.

We’ve seen such unease in the different responses to two incidents that involves discontent from relatively well-off immigrants. In the first case, Sun Xu, a scholar from China, compared Singaporeans to “dogs”. Consequently, his scholarship was terminated by NUS, but Singaporeans were in turn urged to be more gracious. Anton Casey, a private banker who posted about “poor people” and the “stench on public transport”, was not so lucky. He earned a swift and sharp rebuke from a heavyweight minister, K. Shanmugam, who was “terribly upset and offended”.

Different and contradictory skill sets

Political palatability aside, if wealth management has been identified and developed as strategic core competency for Singapore, shouldn’t the startup communities leverage and value-add to this sector? Perhaps we can excel in high-end products in financial yield management and fraud detection, or develop sophisticated technologies to make SAF more efficient. We can develop drones to protect gentrified neighborhoods in Sentosa Cove.

The fact is, entrepreneurs and wealth managers are two very different “animals”. The attitude and aptitude required in these two fields are drastically different, if not contradictory.

Entrepreneurs constantly question the way things are done. While some business successes are based on incremental change, good entrepreneurs dare to challenge the Goliath and look for discontinuities to bring about revolutionary change. They thrive in open markets which are usually egalitarian, noisy, and sometimes messy. Some successful entrepreneurs become exceedingly wealthy. Society typically admires rather than resents them, so long as they are perceived to have battled in a fair and competitive environment using their grit, intelligence and even luck.

Wealth managers, on the other hand, thrive in orderly and stratified societies.The value pyramid of these societies consist of various low-skilled workers at the base, to increasingly senior wealth managers towards the top, with the rich and ultra-rich at the peak. The most important yardstick is the amount of wealth accumulated at the apex, for this is where the trickling down begins. The job descriptions were aptly immortalized by Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu (杜甫):

朝扣富儿门，暮随肥马尘

Translation: knocking doors of rich sons in the morning, and chasing dust behind fat horses in the evening. Bottom line: money matters, nothing else. Remember an MP who said: “if the salary of a minister is only $500,000, it may pose some problems when discussing policies with media CEOs who earn millions or dollars”? Or that nursing was labeled as a low-skilled job in the Population White Paper?  These were not random mistakes, but systemic reflections of the ruling elite’s mindset.

What are our choices?

Are we heading towards a nation of wealth managers (and their humble servants), or entrepreneurs who create the wealth? These are hard choices. The implications are all encompassing, extending far beyond the allocation of resources. Do we train more engineers and programmers, or bankers and accountants? Do we value creativity and diversity, or place a premium on compliance and productivity? Do we invest in our citizens so that our knowledge becomes more valuable and experience more highly-prized as we age? Or do we treat citizens as units of labor whose cost grows with seniority and therefore must be replenished by immigration?

Neither choice is morally superior then the other. It is just what it is: a choice. However, we do need honest, transparent, and constructive discussions on the topic.

Bandung-based game developer Tinker Games has become one of three Indonesian game developers to successfully fundraise using a crowdfunding platform. The team launched its Kickstarter project for a PC game called Pale Blue a month ago, and recently passed its US$48,000 goal. The game has become Indonesia’s biggest crowdfunding campaign for a game.

Pale Blue is a 2D side-scrolling action and stealth game for PC. It tells the story from the antagonist’s point of view where you play the villain and defeat the superheroes. Currently pass the $52,000 mark, the project is still collecting money, which will go into extra game content like more missions and character side stories. The team has released a demo version of the game which you can download for free here.

The other two Indonesian game developers with crowdfunding success are: Digital Happiness with its PC horror game DreadOut, and Ekuator Games with a PC RPG game Celestian Tales: Old North. The two games raised $29,000 and $52,000 respectively. Yeah, they’re all for the PC.

Just like their other successfully funded projects, Pale Blue is looking for your support to sell their game on the Steam Greenlight platform. You can cast your vote here.

Not far from the bustle of Shanghai’s main railway station there’s a co-working space dedicated to the hustle of tech entrepreneurs. Called Yu-Link, it occupies a sizable corner of the fifth floor of an anonymous-looking office building. It’s targeted mostly at foreigners creating startups, says Ben Apple (pictured below), Yu-Link’s managing director.

Aside from desk space and office cubicles, the co-working space organizes and promotes events that the team thinks will be helpful to its members and Shanghai’s startup ecosystem. Last week there was an event about using WeChat, the messaging app that’s ubiquitous in China, for business marketing purposes.

Apple explains that WeChat is instrumental to the co-working company. Not only is the app used to network with people in the industry and promote offline events, but it’s also a major channel for bringing in new members to the space.

Yu-Link currently has a mix of local and overseas tech businesses buying up the space.

Apple admits that the location – far away from the hipster cafe areas around Xintiandi – is not a prime spot for creative-industry expats in the city, but it allows the space to be more affordable. And that, he adds, is a part of the appeal of starting up in mainland China rather than in Hong Kong or other Asian hubs like Singapore: “It’s more affordable to startup in Shanghai, and getting a smart team of people is cheaper too.”

Serving both local and overseas techies, Apple says that it faces cultural differences in the way people work. Chinese entrepreneurs typically prefer more privacy for their founders and therefore want an enclosed cubicle, while residents from other nations welcome the interactions that come from the open-plan desks.

Red tape hurdles

The main value-add that Yu-Link brings to foreign entrepreneurs, says Apple, is that it can help cut through the red tape that faces a new business – especially one run by non-Chinese nationals. Yu-Link offers a package that bundles a rented desk for a year with a ‘wholly owned foreign enterprise’ (WOFE) license for RMB 20,000 (US$3,200) that it can help a new business get through the right channels legally. “We help navigate the red tape, guide them through the process, so they can focus on their business,” Apple adds.

A cheaper option is to rent a single desk for a year for RMB 9,000 (US$1,450).

The two Chinese partners behind Yu-Link have government contacts that could benefit certain kinds of startups – for example a clean tech business could access government subsidies they would otherwise have missed, or a returning Chinese national could qualify for a RMB 1 million (US$160,000) grant when establishing a startup.

Specialization

Yu-Link is looking to specialize in medical devices startups, which is an area of interest of the firm’s Chinese partners as well as an under-served segment in the country. Apple explains that the space is looking to start an incubator program in that niche, which could pull in a mix of Chinese and overseas startups keen to disrupt the medical hardware market. It could prove useful, he says, for US startups wanting to crack the Chinese market with medical devices not yet available here.

The other main co-working space in Shanghai is People Squared, which is home to the Chinaccelerator crew. Other places, like the charming LOHAUS or the funky BundSpace are aimed at shorter-term spaces or hosting events.

Yu-Link is at floor 5A, 638 Hengfeng Road, Shanghai. The nearest subway is Shanghai Railway station on lines 1, 3, and 4.

Appier, a Taipei-based company that leverages artificial intelligence to help businesses and brands push their ads to the right people, has just raised a US$6 million funding round from Sequoia Capital. The investment marks the venture capital firm’s first bet on a Taiwanese startup.

Appier offers an ad optimization engine that leverages big data, artificial intelligence, and real time bidding to ensure that advertisements have a better chance of reaching their ideal target audience. The team places an emphasis on factors like screen type and the time of use, in order to better understand the context that an ad can be placed in. For example, the Appier engine might detect that a certain user is looking at a piece of content on her smartphone in the morning, and deduce that the woman is likely commuting to work – and then serve up an ad for a coffee shop.

This might not sound too different from most other ad tech firms out there, so here’s what you need to know – Appier’s engineering team has extensive training in artificial intelligence. It’s headed up by CEO Chi-Han Yu, a Taiwan native who spent about ten years working at artificial intelligence labs at Harvard and Stanford, developing self-driving cars, four-legged robots, and self-adapting robots – for the latter, think Transformers but for real life.

How did a young AI expert-in-training end up doing mobile marketing in Taiwan? Yu and Appier CTO Joe Su originally set out to start a mobile gaming firm when they were roommates in Boston. As hardcore gamers themselves, their goal was to use their expertise in artificial intelligence to develop challenging and innovative titles. After launching a few games, however, they realized that their publishers and partners would ask them for advice about ad targeting once they learned about their academic backgrounds. Yu recalls:

Back when we were making games, we would use a pitch deck and show it to different publishers. In the last slide i would talk about my experience in AI, just so I could talk a little about some of the cool things I did. But everyone we pitched to became curious and started asked questions about AI. Eventually, we realized our publishers and media partners were relying on us to help with their advertising problems. We  started to study the advertising world and realized that it’s basically a playground for big data guys like us. So we decided to devote all of our time and energy to building this solution that connects businesses and advertisers to the people they want to reach.

Since Appier’s establishment in 2012, the team has grown to include 40 employees spread across offices in Taipei, Singapore, San Francisco, and in the near future, Japan. The company has worked with hundreds of recognizable brands with presences in Asia Pacific, including L’oreal, Lancome, and Ikea.

Appier CEO Chih-Han Yu, left, with CTO Joe Su and COO Winnie Lee

Yu states that the company’s relationship with Sequoia emerged somewhat unexpectedly:

When we moved into our first office in Singapore, Sequoia happened to be working in the same building. We weren’t thinking about doing any fundraising back then, we were just planning on bootstrapping the company and growing on our own revenue. But Sequoia impressed us with their global connections and experience building world-class companies. They can introduce us to partners that would normally take us years to meet.

Appier will use the funding to build up its international sales teams and and ramp up its research and development. While the team will maintain its headquarters in Taipei, Yu says that he and his co-founders moved back to the city for personal reasons, and that Appier’s growth isn’t tied to its geography.

“I don’t think that our location makes a big difference in how we run the company,” says Yu. “In terms of our staff, there’s no difference. We tend to pick to hire people that are very open-minded so we can build a culture that is direct and ambitious.”

Editing by Steven Millward; top image via Flickr user Alvin Chen

Failcon celebrates failure with boisterous applause.  Courtesy of Open Network Lab, the event came to Tokyo to deliver a message of hope: “Embrace your mistakes. Build your success.”

The failures speakers, hailing from both San Francisco and Tokyo, came from a variety of backgrounds but they all had one thing in common: a gift for surviving spectacular setbacks. Here are a few of our favorite stories:

Jay Adelson, serial entrepreneur, ex-CEO of Digg, founder of Equinix

Equinix, a global data center provider, IPO’d in August 2000 and raised US$150 million. The celebration was lavish, but the timing was terrible considering the bursting tech bubble would crater the stock market and leave a series of bankruptcies in its wake. Tech spending essentially stopped and the company was brought to its knees. It survived thanks to a timely acquisition by Singapore Technology Media. The firm is now a world leader in data center construction.

Adelson told the audience that Equinix commissioned an elaborate ice sculpture for the post-IPO party. Using company funds to buy ice sculptures is a bad idea, he gently reminded everyone.

Jay Adelson, ex-CEO of Digg

Kensuke Tsuchiya, CEO of GoodPatch

GoodPatch had three months of money in the bank and its revenue forecast was zero. Fortuitously, Tsuchiya secured a major contract worth approximately US$300,000 – but the work had to be completed within two months. Since the task was so complicated, Tsuchiya hired extra staff, only to see the other company delay payment and eventually back out of the deal. With only US$400 in the bank and still reeling from his unfortunate encounter with a big business bully, he was ready to fold. In the end, Tsuchiya was able to get another sizeable contract with a company that kept its promises. The cash influx kept the company afloat until its UI re-design for Gunosy, the gig that catapulted GoodPatch into success.

Koichiro Yoshida, CEO of Crowdworks

Yoshida had the crowd in stitches describing his many failures prior to hitting it big with Crowdworks. He tried upwards of 13 different businesses, as varied as wine selling in China and building a city from scratch in Malaysia. He thought his breakthrough came when his men’s skirts business attracted outsized media attention. Yoshida summed up the reason for failure succinctly, “The media attention was great but the market was too small.” (translation ours)

Luo Jun, CEO of Tujia, China’s biggest holiday home rental site, seemed so excited about his firm’s US$100 million series C funding that he revealed it on Weibo almost immediately after he got the cash. “I got up early and saw a mail saying the company’s $100 million series C funds arrived yesterday,” he posted this morning, accompanied by a photo of a humble Chinese breakfast of rice porridge.

But that means no other details are available for now. The Airbnb-esque Tujia got series A funding in May 2012, followed by series B at the start of 2013. Both those rounds amounted to RMB 400 million (US$64.2 million).

Tujia’s series B saw participation from an all-star array of investors: GGV Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, CDH Ventures, and Qiming Venture Partners. Plus, China’s biggest travel booking site, Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP), contributed funds, along with America’s HomeAway (NASDAQ:AWAY). We’ve reached out to Tujia and HomeAway for more details on this blockbuster investment and we’ll update if we hear back.

Tujia now has holiday rentals listed in about 130 Chinese cities along with an extensive international selection – in over 60 destinations – furnished by its American partner, HomeAway.

While Chinese rivals like Mayi and Xiaozhou – the latter of which got US$15 million in funding earlier this week – focus on bargain rentals for the lower end of the domestic travel market, Tujia is aimed at the mid-range and high-end with better quality properties.

Airbnb has over 1,000 listings in China right now, but the site is in English and it seems targeted only at incoming travelers.