14 Tech Start ups in Asia this week

Another week has passed in Tech in Asia and below is the list of startups which we have covered. For tips and stories suggestions, feel free to email us at Editors[at]techinasia[dot].com. Enjoy!

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1. NgaturDuit.com | Indonesia

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This week, Indonesia’s first online financial management service, NgaturDuit.com, launched “Rich Game” to educate users on financial matters, especially on investment in Indonesia.

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2. Tweaky.com | Singapore

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Tweaky.com, an online marketplace for people to connect with web designers, has recently raised a seed round of AUS$450,000 (US$468,000) from Australian investors Mark Harbottle (founder of 99designs), Leni Mayo (Learnable CEO), and the Sitepoint group.

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3. Koprol | Indonesia

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After Koprol, the founders went on to set up Ice House and Barito Labs. Yahoo also made a classy move by returning all the rights associated with the trademark and domain names that were obtained at the time of the initial acquisition to the founders.

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4. Friday | India

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The Indian startup that created the much-lauded Iris app – aka: “Siri for Android” – has another impressive Android-only creation with the newly-launched Friday. The tagline for the Friday app is that it lets you “forget to remember” – so it’s an all-knowing, auto-compiled journal of your calls, messages, photos, movements, and all kinds of other things.

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5. Aibilities | Indonesia

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One of the Jakarta Founders Institute’s graduates, Aibilities, recently just launched its new free android app called Dokita. Dokita, which stands for “dokter kita” or in English “our doctor,” provides users with first step health advice from stand-by doctors in period of 30 minutes to 1 hour on weekdays, from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.

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6. Camera360 | China

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The makers of the hit photo app Camera360 have brought their image-altering expertise to a new stage: a Photoshop-esque website called 52Photo.com where people can upload, tweak, and add effects to photos.

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7. TeknoUp | Indonesia

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TeknoUp, the Indonesian site that specialized in reviewing gadgets and covering technology, has launched an e-commerce site focusing on gadget this week.

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8. Fazzione | Indonesia

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Fazzione is a private sales site offering discounts up to 90 percent for fashion products to site members only. It has 700,000 members so far which we thought is quite impressive.

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9. Sugo Toys Japan | Indonesia

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Sugo Toys Japan is a new service that allows users to buy a new toy from Japan each month on a subscription basis. It capitalizes on the popularity of Japanese manga, anime, and video games which are popular with fans overseas.

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10. Chope | Singapore

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Chope, the Singapore-based online restaurant reservation startup, has served its one-millionth diner this week and also expanded its service to Hong Kong.

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11. Urbanesia | Indonesia

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Indonesian city lifestyle directory website Urbanesia yesterday announced that its API is now open for third-party developers. The API will allow other apps to make use of Urbanesia’s location data, and it can even display very focused categories such as restaurants and tourist spots.

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12. SoundGecko | Australia

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SoundGecko is a text-to-audio transcribing service which allows you to listen to written content while on-the-go.

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13. MyColorscreen | Thailand

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Thailand-based startup, MyColorscreen, is a site that provides you with gorgeous-looking mobile wallpaper. It’s all user-generated and you don’t have to buy them. Users who upload them will share with the community, thereby showcasing various designs, effects, and typographic styles.

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14. Zhouwu | China

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Zhouwu (means Friday in Chinese) is a travel e-commerce site that lets you snag venue tickets online, getting you into historical sites, museums, scenic spots, and more.

new startup ideas from the Babson Summer Venture Program demo day

Babson College held its Summer Venture Program "demo day" this afternoon, showcasing 14 startup ideas that students have been working on for the last two-and-a-half months. The teams come not just from Babson, but also Olin College and Wellesley.

Here's a quick run-down, along with the four concepts I liked best.

- AUDEN - Rebecca Borenstein, Babson and Charlotte Greenough
New clothing line that wants to offer reasonably-priced "classics with a twist" for women, which can be worn at work or out on the town. Hoping to raise $150,000 to produce the first AUDEN collection.
- BEEP - Ramon Salinas, Babson
BEEP stands for Business Entrepreneurship Extension Packs. Non-profit will create extension packs for popular board games to teach business and entrepreneurship skills to kids. They're starting with — what else? — Monopoly. The extension pack for Monopoly adds stores and factories, for instance, along with new rules and new "Chance" cards.
- BYOBeats - Thomas Lavin, Babson
BYOBeats offers a unique wireless and portable surround sound system that connects sound from any media device in your home. (Description provided by Babson; company didn't present because they are in discussions with a prospective investor, I'm told.)
- CAMFormulas.com - Josh Harwell, Babson
CAMFormulas.com is an online megastore for "pharmaceutical-grade" vitamins and supplements recommended by doctors or other healthcare providers. (The name refers to "complementary and alternative medicines.") Has generated $70,000 in sales this year. Hoping to raise $500,000.
- Expressionality - David Blutenthal, Babson
Create music playlists on Facebook and share them with friends. Expressionality shows you how much you have in common, musically, with your friends. Playlists can be imported into Spotify. Phase 2 for the service involves linking playlists to certain moods, activities, and situations. Expressionality will be free to the user, subsidized by affiliate partnerships, advertising, and sales of data about user tastes. Seeking to raise $150,000.
- HeSpoke - Njweng (Jojo) Yangni & Stella Odewumi, Wellesley College
HeSpoke is a menswear e-tailer that curates apparel for guys between the age of 20 and 30 — too old to shop at Urban Outfitters, but too edgy for Brooks Brothers. They describe their eclectic style as "Brooklyn prep," and focus on a price point between $40 and $100. (Odewumi is on the left in the picture above, and Yangni on the right.)
- MandaSeguro - Matias Sevi, Babson
MandaSeguro wants to disrupt Western Union's money transfer business, with its high fees. Fifty million Hispanics in the U.S. send over $60 billion every year to families in Latin America, Sevi says. MandaSeguro uses PayPal to send money directly to specific retail outlets, like a pharmacy or supermarket, where recipients can use it as store credit. Company has raised $120,000 in seed funding so far, and is hoping to raise $200,000 more.
- Mixcal - Andy Huang, Babson
Helps universities and student groups promote their events. Aggregates event listings on MeetUp.com, Eventbrite, university calendars and serves up a personalized event list based on your own interests as well as what your friends are doing. Plans to sell subscriptions to the service to universities. Huang is hoping to raise a $50,000 seed round for Mixcal.
- Ninth Isle - Ronald Diep, Babson
E-commerce site focusing on Hawaiian-made products, from a native Hawaiian.
- Nomadico Travel - Nick DiMatteo, Babson
"Nomadico Travel is a socially responsible eco-friendly tour operator that specializes in customized tours to Latin America with a focus on authentic cultural interaction." (Description provided by Babson; company didn't present.)
- PhotoOil Arts - Lei Wang, Babson
Provides customized oil paintings, based on photographs, completed in 3-4 weeks. Choose from twenty different painters (some are in the U.S., but most are in China), each with a different style. Paintings start at $600.
- Qonfide.com - Colby Sato, Olin College
Site aims to change the coming-out experience by connecting closeted (and anonymous) students with openly-gay peers and teachers in the community, based on shared interests, religion, or ethnicity.
- SidewalkAd - Cliff Lee, Babson & Walter Dobberpuhl
Helping local businesses bring in new customers, and generate loyalty, by delivering special offers to the company's Android and iPhone mobile apps. Already live with more than 40 businesses. Hoping to raise $400,000 to "accelerate our growth in New England," Lee says. (Lee is pictured at right.)
- Taxi Right Now - Sam Garzon, Babson
Use an app on your mobile phone to call a cab. Garzon says that taxi drivers are idle 45 percent of the time, and Taxi Right Now will provide them with additional business. Unlike other taxi apps, Garzon says Taxi Right Now will send messages to drivers across several different taxi companies, as well as independent operators. The company plans to launch in August with the second-biggest taxi company in Boston, and Garzon hopes to raise $300,000 so that he can expand from Boston to three other cities.
The four ideas that I thought were most unique, have the biggest potential, and were presented the most effectively? PhotoOil Arts, Expressionality, HeSpoke, and MandaSeguro. But CAMFormulas gets a special mention for generating the most revenue while still in the Summer Venture Program.

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When to Change a Winning Strategy

Companies tend to repeat what has worked for them in the past. In our research on the telecom industry, for example, we found that the great majority of the executives we surveyed preferred internal development to external sourcing when they needed to develop differentiated products and services. We get similar results in other industries, though the preferred growth mode may differ.

The reliance on a single growth mode is misplaced. The other key finding from our research is that firms prepared to grow in diverse ways outperform the ones that narrowly focus on one single mode. Specifically, we found that firms using multiple modes to obtain new resources were 46 percent more likely to survive over a five-year period than those using only alliances, 26 percent more likely then those using only M&A, and 12 percent more likely than those using only internal development. To succeed, therefore, managers have to learn when and how to abandon the strategies they have grown up with.

The latest firm to learn this lesson is the pharmacy chain Walgreens. Its story starts like many success stories do: An innovative concept coupled with a first-mover advantage, enabling a rapid physical expansion and generating increasing returns to scale. Walgreens was a pioneer in the "self-service" format that is now ubiquitous in general-purpose pharmacies, and it became the largest self-service retailer in the country through the green-field development of new stores and distribution centers.

But by the end of the 1990s, the company had run out of steam. Its business model was looking out-dated as the Internet and mail order channels became more important. Pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs) were also growing in strength and aggressiveness. There was a larger focus on generic drugs and generic drug leaders. And there was new domestic competition from stores like Target and Wal-Mart, as well as growth in emerging markets.

Walgreens initially responded to these challenges an internally-focused strategy. It created its own PBM and started an online pharmacy in addition to opening almost 1,000 new stores in the U.S. so as to increase coverage. The strategy had moderate success at first: Sales and assets grew gradually, while profitability remained stable and even grew slightly. But it was hard work and returns soon started falling off.

So in 2005 Walgreens started to break with its traditions. Over the past seven years, it has made a series of acquisitions and alliances to expand into new US regions and new product lines. In parallel, the company has divested activities that were no longer part of its growth strategy - including selling its PBM business, relying instead on contracts with other PBMs to supply drugs to their members. Walgreens has continued to use internally-driven growth where appropriate, but the change in its growth strategy is helping Walgreens to reposition itself in a dynamic environment.

This change in Walgreens' approach to growth has finally started to pay some dividends. After ten years of lagging the sector and, more importantly, archrival CVS, the company's share price has come back to life this year, posting a 20% rise in July.

The Walgreens story shows the dangers of becoming reliant on one growth strategy, even a successful one. When the environment changes, as it inevitably will, it is difficult to learn how to use new modes of obtaining key resources quickly and well. It has taken Walgreens almost a decade to learn how to use acquisitions and alliances to complement its internal development strength.

The moral of the story is that it is better not to fall into the trap of being reliant on a single growth strategy. Sustained profitable growth requires a balanced portfolio of growth strategies and the management capabilities to implement them. Firms that do not carefully weigh competing paths, but instead dutifully replicate a preferred past method — no matter how diligently they pursue it — will often stumble and fail. They will lose ground to firms that pursue more disciplined and multi-faceted approaches of reviewing, selecting, and balancing the different growth paths.

As for Walgreens, time will tell whether it maintains the discipline. The company's latest move —taking a 45% share in European health and beauty group Alliance Boots for $6.7 billion — has raised some eyebrows in the financial community: it is a surprisingly big bet on Europe in the midst of the euro crisis. But perhaps the bigger long term risk is that the company will fall into the trap of becoming to reliant on big acquisitions of this kind going forward and forgets the virtues of the other pathways to growth.

How to be creative – the short honest truth

Creativity is best thought of as a kind of effort, not an abstract thing – it’s what goes on when you are trying to solve a problem. The problem could be writing a poem, making a song, designing a website, anything. But no creative person in history was creative independent of working on some kind of project.

The biggest difference between you and Picasso, or Einstein, or whoever your heroes are is that they out work you. They spend more time in front of a canvas, or guitar, or computer, working away at applying their minds and souls to specific things.

Want to be more creative? Pick a problem you care about and get to work.  If you don’t care about anything, your problem isn’t creativity, it’s apathy. If you start things and give up, your problem isn’t creativity, it’s dedication.

Few people in history that we call creatives today read books or took courses on creativity. Instead they apprenticed with masters in a craft and worked with them. They did the grunt work until they had the skills needed to do more sophisticated work. They learned how to develop ideas and deliver finished work by working. There is no other way.

Don’t believe me? Pick any creative hero, and any creative work they’re famous for, and investigate how many sketches, or drafts, or attempts they had to make to get it right. They may have had flashes of insight here and there, but those came while they were working their asses off. Ideas are cheap, it’s the passion to make ideas real that’s rare.

Are you creating value for your firm?

---- by Nicholas Bray ---It’s a tough world out there and only firms that succeed in creating value will survive in the long-term. The key is to focus on what your customers really want. Economic crises are not without a silver lining for those who can recognise a good deal. Amid the wreckage of recession, “There are plenty of opportunities as long as you have the talents and skills to manage them,” says Kevin Kaiser, INSEAD Professor of Management Practice, and Director of INSEAD’s Advanced Valuation Program to be held in September 2012 in Paris. It’s not just a matter of buying up assets at bargain-basement prices, however.  The price you pay is one thing, but the value that you generate, or fail to generate, is quite another. Winning a bidding contest is easy if you don’t care about value destruction, Kaiser says. “You just pay the price that wins.” But winning and creating value is much harder. Cheap prices don’t necessarily equate with good value. “That requires both an understanding of value and of the business you are buying as well as the skills and ability to deliver the value in a way that more than compensates for the price you paid.” Misguided incentive schemes Kaiser also believes that focusing on the bottom line alone is another cause of value destruction. When boards of directors “end up orienting their company around short-term targets that often require value destruction in order to deliver, they pay people, literally, to blow up the company”.  Kaiser points a specifically accusatory finger at boards of directors who design incentive schemes for their senior executives based on short-term indicators such as market share, earnings per share or their company’s share price. Sometimes, he says, these targets can only be met by destroying value rather than creating it. That happens, for example, when companies sell products at prices below production cost in order to boost short-term sales. Such strategies can work for a while. A car manufacturer can sell a lack-lustre model by offering discounts, special payment terms and other incentives. An airline can fill seats even though its planes are uncomfortable and often delayed as long as travellers have no alternatives. In the long run, however, such companies go to the wall. Why companies fail Value destruction has certainly been evident amid the current financial and economic crisis. Firms have laid off millions of workers, factories have been left idle and construction projects unfinished. Rather than being a result of the crisis, however, Kaiser says, value destruction has been at the root of it, and it has been taking place over decades. Now, as its full extent becomes apparent, the crisis is entering a phase in which “people are finding it more and more difficult to sustain what has become unsustainable.”  This creates opportunities to reallocate inappropriately deployed resources to more profitable areas. For the process to be profitable, however, these resources must be managed efficiently. Many companies fall by the wayside, either because they fail to adapt to changing circumstances or because they follow misguided strategies. Instead of reallocating resources to take account of new market conditions, they “keep people in jobs that they shouldn’t be in and don’t allow them to adapt and develop the skills needed to be relevant and value-creating,” says Kaiser. Instead of trying to understand what people want and then producing and selling it, they “focus on selling the customer what they have to sell”. A Darwinian view A 20-year veteran at INSEAD who has worked on mergers and acquisitions strategy at McKinsey & Company and on business finance at a venture capital-financed start-up, Kaiser takes a Darwinian view of corporate endeavour. In the cut-throat world of commerce, he asserts, only the fittest firms survive. The key to success, as he sees it, is a proper understanding of value and how to create it. Deliver value on a project and you will prosper. Destroy value and you are doomed. Creating value is the theme of Kaiser’s teaching at INSEAD.  Among the many skills required for successful acquisitions and investments, Kaiser says, “The first is to understand the value of what you are buying and the second involves your ability to manage the business once you have bought it.” Understanding the value of an investment requires a long-term view. In the context of an acquisition, Kaiser explains, value consists of “the cash flows that you now have access to because of what you just bought”. Calculating investments Start by calculating what he calls the “free cash flow”, i.e. the cash that will be left over after you have paid for the initial investment plus also all future costs, including salaries, payments to suppliers, taxes and future investments in the business. Then adjust this figure to take account of the period over which the cash will become available. That gives you the estimated “present value” of the acquisition, enabling you to calculate the return that you can expect from your investment. Compare this with the “opportunity cost of capital”, i.e. what could have been earned by deploying the resources on an alternative project of similar risk. For example, for an investment of very little risk, a comparable investment might be in government bonds of a government with very low default risk. If all these calculations turn out positive, you may be onto a winner.  But once you have acquired the asset, the next challenge is to manage it. What companies should be doing, he says, is focusing on customer satisfaction. “There are lots of customers out there and they love their iPhones, their flat-screen TVs and their new cars. If you are willing and able to provide these things and cover your costs, using your people efficiently while you do it,” says Kaiser, “there are lots of opportunities.”

The 6 People You Need in Your Corner

Nothing incredible is accomplished alone. You need others to help you, and you need to help others. With the right team, you can form a web of connections to make the seemingly impossible practically inevitable.

The Instigator:

  

Someone who pushes you, who makes you think. Who motivates you to get up and go, and try, and make things happen. You want to keep this person energized, and enthusiastic. This is the voice of inspiration.

The Cheerleader:

This person is a huge fan, a strong supporter, and a rabid evangelist for you and your work. Work to make this person rewarded, to keep them engaged. This is the voice of motivation.

The Doubter:

  This is the devil’s advocate, who asks the hard questions and sees problems before they arise. You need this person’s perspective. They are looking out for you, and want you to be as safe as you are successful. This is the voice of reason.

The Taskmaster:

 
   

This is the loud and belligerent voice that demands you gets things done. This person is the steward of momentum, making sure deadlines are met and goals are reached. This is the voice of progress.

The Connector:

 This person can help you find new avenues and new allies. This person breaks through roadblocks into finds ways to make magic happen. You need this person to reach people and places you can’t. This is the voice of cooperation and community.

The Example:

This is your mentor, you hero, your North Star. This is the person who you seek to emulate. This is your guiding entity, someone whose presence acts as a constant reminder that you, too, can do amazing things. You want to make this person proud. This is the voice of true authority.

The Disney India MD will use his private wealth to build scale and brands in agriculture, health care and education

First, Ronnie Screwala has launched a private equity fund (Unilazer Ventures) with a corpus of Rs 300-400 crore, which would provide seed capital to companies in these areas. “I want to look at scale, build brands and change the perception about these three sensational areas,” he says.

To begin with, the company has already invested about Rs 20 crore in INI Farms, involved in pomegranate plantations on over 1,000 acres across Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The project involves doubling productivity and increasing the export content from 40 per cent of the total production now to over 70 per cent with the help of modern farming and post-harvest technologies. The idea is to create a pomegranate brand.

“There are huge opportunities in agriculture and health care. Nobody has positioned these sectors as an exciting opportunity when it comes to business, even though the margins are as high as 45-70 per cent. If two or three people start glamorising the industry over the next two-three years, we’ll be able to look at scale and brand building for such sectors,” he adds.

Screwvala is also looking at opportunities in rural health care, a sunshine industry that remains neglected. “That’s the opportunity. Chances are you are going to be the only guy in this business. It’s true there is a shortage of qualified doctors, but basic amenities in health care like pathology labs don’t need MBBS doctors,” he says.

The second part of his dream project, for which he has himself committed Rs 250 crore over the next five years, is even more ambitious. His foundation called Share has finalised a blueprint to “improve the livelihood and empower people” in seven villages of Maharashtra, covering a million people across eight talukas and five districts.

“Our idea is not to donate money but to help the villagers become independent enough to earn their livelihood. We want to have an exit strategy where we help them for the first two years by giving them enough push. Then, they take it over themselves,” he adds.

Screwvala is now looking to raise another Rs 250 crore from other donors. “If I could hold roadshows for UTV during its IPO, I think I can do it for a good cause as well. We need to have a corporate mindset in social responsibility kind of work,” he says.

4 Tech Start Ups in Asia

1. BeliFurniture | Indonesia

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Founded in January 2012, BeliFurniture.com claims to be the biggest office furniture reseller in Indonesia with 5,000 products posted…

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2. Strollay | India

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Many e-commerce sites sell apparel. But few focus on ethnic outfits — Indian in particular — such as Sarees and Salwar Kameez. Based in Surat, Gujarat in India, Strollay is an e-commerce site that does just that, selling Lehenga Sarees, Lehenga Choli, and Kurtis/Tunics…

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3. Perx | Singapore

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Perx, the Mobile loyalty stamp card app, has passed along some interesting statistics through an email update to all users. Launched late last year, the startup has helped merchandisers generate 260,000 ‘chops’ (or stamps) across 600 active locations…

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4. Kuai Pijiu | China

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China’s vibrant and increasingly niche e-commerce sector now has a site just for buying quality beer. Called Kuai Pijiu (literally: “quick beer”) it sells the kind of imported beers – with an emphasis on German brands like Paulaner and Krombacher (pictured below); but sadly no Benderbrau – that can only be bought in specialist outlets in some parts of China…

Seattle startup Qthru lets you skip the grocery store checkout line

 Qthru, an app and checkout kiosk system for retail and grocery stores that he hopes will revolutionize the way we shop and check out of stores.

“We went with the simplest technology available,” Roberts said. “There’s no new technology required from the store.”

Basically, the app uses a smartphone camera to scan bar codes on store shelves, much the same way apps like RedLaser do, and then put those items into a digital shopping cart. After a customer is done shopping, he or she walks up to the checkout kiosk, taps the button on the app, enters a PIN and the system charges the customer’s pre-entered credit card. Then, the kiosk spits out a receipt, a store employee checks the customer’s bag to make sure the items match the receipt, and the customer leaves.

No lines. No fighting with difficult-to-use self-checkout systems. No waiting.

A beta version of the Qthru system is currently being tested at the Snoqualmie Ridge IGA, where a select group of people have been using the app to check out.

For Tyler Myers, who owns the Snoqualmie IGA, four other IGA stores and a hardware store, the Qthru app has a variety of potential uses in addition to making it easier for people to check out.

“There’s a lot to be done with coupon and suggestive selling,” Myers said.

Myers said a store could use the app to suggest a wine to go with a piece of meat the customer scanned, or if a customer scans Heinz ketchup, but the Hunt's ketchup is on sale, the app would alert the customer to the possible savings or coupon.

One tricky thing Qthru had to overcome when creating the system was how to deal with weight-based items such as fruit or self-serve coffee beans. So Qthru introduced a scale that weighs the produce or bulk items to be purchased and spits out a receipt, which can then be scanned.

The app also alerts an employee if the customer is purchasing alcohol so that the employee can check the customer’s age before he or she leaves.

Roberts said Qthru is prepared for near-field communication systems that will allow people to use their smartphones as wallets. The system will let customers scan anything with a built-in RFID chip, if products start embedding them, and the kiosks have NFC technology already built in.

“The cost of NFC is coming down, but it’s still expensive,” Roberts said.

In the next week or so, Qthru will roll out the app for the iPhone, which will be quickly followed by Android and Windows Phone apps. Meanwhile, the company is installing the kiosks in the rest of Myers' stores, including the downtown Kress IGA at Third Avenue and Pike Street. Roberts hopes it catches on and other retailers sign on. The company just received an infusion of $3.5 million from several out-of-state investors that did not want their names released.

For Roberts, an entrepreneur with 10 years of experience at Research in Motion (RIM), this is the realization of a dream.