The Top 50 Apps in Asia – Results

The Top 50 Apps program started with the aim of discovering and shining the spotlight on popular web and mobile applications from Asia. When we closed polling on Aug 31, we had received over 100 nominations from 10 countries.

Voting took place from July 22 to Aug 31. Thousands of users and readers voted and commented on their favorite app.

See who made it to be Asia’s Top 50 Apps in the list below. While the Top 50 poll was a test of popularity, the next stage will demand more than that. In the next stage of the competition, the Top 10 apps will be selected based on merit by our internal panel of judges (announcing shortly). So what does it take to be Asia’s Top 10 Apps?

Catch the Top 10 Apps at Accelerate 2010, Asia’s largest innovation conference on Sept 22-23. Book by 31 Aug for more than 30% off tickets. Use promo code ‘E27EARLY’.

We present to you, the Top 50 Apps in Asia (in alphabetical order)

123Passport Photo
8Squirrels
adadiskon
BukuQ
buUuk
Cacoo
Creately
eevent
elevyn
FlickEvents
FlutterScape
Foound
Gamelan
Gantibaju
ideaken
InSync
Kaskus
KayaKarya
Koprol
Lang-8
LewatMana.com
MainMusik.com
Max99
Mig33
Movreak
PandaForm
PassWindow
PicLyf
Questetra BPM Suite
Quik
ResumeTracker
secondCRM
Sekai Camera
SG NextBus
ShowNearby
Singpath
SocialWalk
stictok
Suzerein KPI Matrix
Tapp
Tokobagus
Tokopedia
Tuitwit
TwitCasting
Twt140
Urbanesia
Voicetap
WaveSecure
Wego
Zopim

Note: If you’re part of the Top 50 Apps list and haven’t sent us your high-res logo and your product description in 100 words, please do so immediately. This will ensure accurate description of your product in the Top 50 Apps directory that will be given to over 4000 attendees to SingTel iLuminate and Accelerate 2010.

Top 50 Apps poll closed

As of 12:00 am today, we have officially closed the Top 50 Apps poll. We have received thousands of votes for more than 100 nominees.

As we are tabulating the results, we invite e27 readers to take a guess on who you think will be in the Top 50?

mig33 chairman joins Loopt, joojoo-TechCrunch legal faceoff, Singapore Startups in China

Loopt hires Steve Boom as President: Popular location-based startup Loopt has hired Steve Boom to drive their growth and monetization strategies. Boom was the former CEO of Singapore-based mobile company, mig33. He will continue to serve as chairman of mig33 after he joins Loopt. He was also the senior vice-president at Yahoo where he was oversaw their mobile business. Boom has over a decade of experience in building global teams, product management, sales and business development in the mobile industry.

joojoo-TechCrunch lawsuit debacle: After months of silence on the joojoo-TechCrunch fiasco, the US district court has dismissed TechCrunch’s claims including the request for a preliminary injunction. The court however did not dismiss the breach of fiduciary duty claim. Nilay Patel, former attorney and Engadget editor writes, this ruling is a significant win and a significant loss to TechCrunch. This is because the court ruled that TechCrunch and Fusion Garage are business partners with legal obligations. In a statement released by Fusion Garage they said, “Fusion Garage believes it emerged overall in a strong position coming out of this legal round.” There has been no response from TechCrunch so far.

India puts off BlackBerry ban for two months: BlackBerry is testing out some local technical solutions for security agencies and intelligence bureau to monitor encrypted messages. The government also expects RIM to have a server in India so that Indian authorities have easier access to information that passes through them, reports Wall Street Journal. UAE, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are also among the countries demanding monitoring of BlackBerry messages. UAE has decided to ban BB messenger, e-mail and web browsing starting Oct 11.

Singapore startups gaining traction in China: IDMPO, an inter-agency outfit hosted by MDA (Media Development Authority of Singapore) handling the funding and support of Interactive Digital Media startups, recently conducted a match making session in China. Following this session, 18 agreements were signed between the IDMPO companies and China-based companies. This is in addition to the $100million Gobi China-Singapore Media Venture fund to support Singapore startups gaining access to the Chinese market. Noteworthy partnerships from this trip include, acquisition of Azure studio by TimeVoyager, five agreements between MXR and other Chinese and Singaporean companies to explore the use of the mixed reality in projects in China and Singapore.

Buzzcity Developer Garage: Buzzcity is organizing their monthly meet up with developers on Friday, Sept 24. Speakers at this event include Calvin Cheng and Tudor Munteanu, software developers and consultants from Odeon Consulting and Johan D. Kremer, Head of Alliances for SEA, Research in Motion, Singapore.
Topics for the session are “Usability and Commerce on smartphones” and “Lifestyle Driven by Innovation with BlackBerry”.

SlideShare’s Amit Ranjan on making it outside the Valley

Amit Ranjan is a co-founder, and the chief operating officer of the popular content-sharing service, SlideShare, which gets 70 million pageviews a month. Many people also know him through his observations on the Indian tech scene on his blog, Webyantra.

We caught up with him recently to find out what has changed for him and SlideShare ahead of his talk in Singapore next month. Amit is based in India and SlideShare does most of its development work there. We asked him what it’s like running a successful Asian web company outside Silicon Valley’s charmed circle.

Hear Amit Ranjan live at Accelerate 2010, Asia’s largest innovation conference on Sept 22-23. Book by 31 Aug for more than 30% off tickets. Use promo code ‘E27EARLY’.

On the challenges facing SlideShare

I think we have done well in overcoming our first challenge, of gaining users (SlideShare has 25 million visitors monthly, and 70 million pageviews). That we have gained a critical mass of users also means that our product concept is validated.

Phase two, which is where SlideShare is at now, is profitability. We raised funds through a round of Series A funding in 2008, and now we are very close to being profitable.

Now I think we have a much better grasp of the technology, and of the challenges of scalability than four years before, but a lot of this we had to learn on our own. India has a very active domestic scene, but very few Indian startups have a global footprint. We cannot just hire someone with relevant information; we have to work things out ourselves.

On being an “outsider”

You can’t deny that the centre of gravity is Silicon Valley. Not having a US footprint would definitely be difficult. SlideShare has a unique position as it has two offices—most of the development is done here in New Delhi, but the other two founders (Rashmi Sinha, CEO; Jonathan Boutelle, Head Geek) are based in our San Francisco office.

It’s less about having a physical presence in the US as it is about keeping abreast of what is happening in the tech capital of the world—who is doing what? How are they doing it? This can be through a US office, sure, but it’s also possible with US-based advisors and investors, and contacts.

On developments in the Indian tech scene

In India, more people use their mobile phones to access the Internet than with a PC. While the mobile platform has its limitations and is not suitable for all products and services, there is a lot of potential in payment platforms and gaming.

Currently, 3G services are limited and smartphone penetration is low. This may change when 3G is more widely rolled out in late 2010 so I’ll be keeping an eye on that.

I’m excited to meet tech folks outside of India!—I’m active on the Indian and Silicon Valley circuits but haven’t had much exposure to Asia. And there are a lot of exciting things happening in Asia—South Korea has the highest Internet penetration rate, for example, so I am excited about coming to Singapore for Accelerate 2010 and meeting these people.

Last two days to vote for your favorite App

The Top 50 Apps program aims to discover the best web and mobile applications in Asia. The contest has been running for a month and the response has been overwhelming. We’ve received thousands of votes from our readers and the respective App users.

The Top 10 Apps picked by our judges from the pool of Asia’s Top 50 Apps. The chosen App will win three months rent-free at Plug and Play Tech Centre in Silicon Valley and a chance to pitch at the largest innovation conference in Asia – Accelerate 2010.

The voting will end on 23:59, August 31st (SGT) and the results will be announced on Sep 1.

Hurry and don’t miss this chance to VOTE for your favorite app.

MIT’s Andrés Monroy-Hernandez on social computing

Andrés Monroy-Hernandez is a researcher doing his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. His focus is on social computing. He analyses and designs social software that supports collaboration. Andrés holds a MS in Media Technology from MIT and a BS in Electronic Systems Engineering from Tec de Monterrey in México.

Andrés is the founder of two social software applications online, Scratch and Sana. Scratch helps kids and novices learn programming while creating interactive media. On the other hand, Sana makes professional medical help available to developing countries where medical services are stretched thin.

e27 managed to grab a quick phone interview with him to hear more about his social entrepreneurship endeavors.

Hear Andrés Monroy-Hernandez live at Accelerate 2010, Asia’s largest innovation conference on Sept 22-23. Book by 31 Aug for more than 30% off tickets. Use promo code ‘E27EARLY’.

Sana, The Next Billion, and cancer screening in Zambia
Sana started as a very simple project for a class. We were taking a class at MIT and at MIT there’s this initiative called The Next Billion Network. This initiative organizes classes called The Next Class and the idea of the class was to develop technologies for the developing world and the organizer of the class puts students in touch with organizations around the world that needed some kind of technology.

The way we started was me and Leo Celi, who is a doctor, we were both assigned to work with an organization in Zambia who was in-charged of doing cancer screening in the country. The organization is composed mainly of nurses who go around the country to do cancer screening for women. They were taking pictures of suspected cancerous tissues, using a digital camera, and bring the pictures on a USB drive to the capital for diagnosis.

What we did was to partner with this organization to develop a simple solution so that they don’t have to come to the capital to bring their photos but they could use the mobile phones to take the pictures, collect the medical information, and send all that through their mobile phones to a central server in the capital.

We developed this prototype for them and went to Zambia for a few days to do a pilot program there with the nurses. This was how it started, just Leo and myself working on this project.

Later on, what happened was that organizations outside of Zambia thought that this was a very interesting idea and they asked to connect Sana to this popular medical report system called OpenMRS so that when you get information on your phone, you can upload it to this existing piece of server software that people use to store medical information. Hence, we connected Sana to OpenMRS and did a lot of improvements attracting a lot of interest from people and organizations.

Leo is from the Philippines and he has a lot of contacts there so he started a partnership with one of the hospitals there, in this case it was not for cancer but for respiratory diseases.

Sana’s funding model
Right now the application of Sana is mostly in pilots in about three or four countries. Each pilot might involved a couple hundreds of people. There has not been a full deployment so far, as a lot of things in the medical world moves very slowly, but there has been a lot of interest from the pilots and there’s hopes that in the next few months or sooner there will be a  more established effort to deploy Sana in a bigger environment.

Basically we work alongside non-profits or hospitals in different countries. So the countries’ government might give funding to the non-profits and the non-profits are the ones who start using Sana as part of their pilots. So Sana is indirectly funded by the governments. There are also some grants from the World Bank and other financial institutions that allows people to channel to Sana.

What’s on the frontier of social computing
“The main area of research that I am doing is a field called social computing. Basically the field seeks to analyse and develop systems like Sana and Scratch which allows people to collaborate and cooperate online. I have developed these two systems so what I am focusing more on now it the research part it.

For example, one of the things that I have been looking at is the concept of remixing, because remixing is something that happens in a lot of these spaces. The concept is that you might see some object like a video image and you want to download that and make changes to it, creating what I call a “remix” which is a derivative work of different projects.

For example, some people may see a song they like, and they see a video that they find interesting. What they often do is they download the song and the video and they combine them to create a new object. This is something that is happening online in a lot of different spaces. So, I’m interested in looking at how people and these systems allow and support this type of social creation.”

Kids’ programming app Scratch
I’m part of the group called the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. For the past 25-30 years, people from this group have been working on the creation of tools that empower people to be creative and to develop their own products rather than consuming other people’s content.

About six years ago, we started this project of developing a new programming environment for kids and novices, basically people who don’t know how to program or who have never programmed before, based on the idea of Logo, which was a programming environment for kids in the 70’s, to create a new environment that allows people to create interactive media.

This is in the form of games, animation, art, et cetera, that not only uses text but also digital media that is becoming more popular among kids. One of the things we notice was that a lot of the kids were really interested in software like (Adobe) Photoshop for example. However, Photoshop does not allow you to do much programming so what we thought of was to combine the attractiveness of Photoshop, in terms of being able to edit and manipulate images, with programming. Hence, the idea of Scratch came to be. One of the things we thought it was important to have was the ability to introduce music and images, combining all of this to create interactive media.

One of the ideas of Scratch was to help people learn programming, but it is broader than that. Another idea was also to help people be creative and express it. Another thing that we saw was that a lot of the tools for novices around, in terms of learning and education, are often focused on the idea of pushing information, telling people what to do. We wanted to do something different by letting people decide what they want to do by giving them the tools that allows them to create things that they care about. So, rather than creating instructions and materials on how to program, we wanted to allow people to just get the tools and decide on what they want to make.

Who uses Scratch?
We released Scratch in May 2007 but we were beta testing Scratch for a few years before we went public. There were a couple of hundred users during the beta testing stages. By the time we released the site, we started to receive more attention and now there are more than half a million users on the website and even more people who have used Scratch on other spaces.

There are two types of people who uses Scratch, people who use Scratch on the website and people who use Scratch outside of the website. This is people who download Scratch on their computers in schools or at home and may never register an account as well as people who uses Scratch on the XO laptop. The XO laptop is part of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative which provides cheap computers to kids in developing countries and a lot of these machines comes with Scratch pre-installed.

There are millions of these machines around the world that has Scratch so you can think of these people also as Scratch users. So I’ll say that maybe there are more than 2 million people using Scratch around the world. One of the difficulties is that it is really hard to measure people who are using Scratch that are not on the website. So we see a lot of activity on the website, which is really great, but there are also a lot of activity outside of the website.

Scratch 2.0
We are working on multiple things. One of them is creating more space online for people to collaborate.
The next version of Scratch would allow people to create projects on the website and also allow people to remix media that is online. For example, using a program on Scratch you can use a variable storing scores of a game. The idea is that maybe in the future you would be able to store this variables on the cloud so that people who come and play the game multiple times they can store their scores online.

Also the idea of pulling data from the cloud. So for example, you can have a game that gets data from Facebook or Twitter so that your game or your animation is not only using media or data you produce but also media and data that leaves on the cloud on other sites. So when you are playing a Scratch project in the future, you will be able to use images from Flickr or videos from Youtube. So the idea is really making Scratch a very powerful environment for mashing up media that leaves online, on the cloud. That is one aspect of Scratch that we are really interested in exploring and this is something that is actively being developed in what we call Scratch 2.0.

Scratch’s funding model
So far the idea has always been to release Scratch for free because part of the advantages of Scratch over a lot of other platforms is that people don’t have to pay for it and it is very important for the development of Scratch and the popularity of Scratch.

Currently there are no plans to make it into a commercial endeavor and I believe that part of the philosophy of Scratch and part of the appeal of Scratch is that to always make it free. There are of course some interest in partnering with companies that might be interested in supporting Scratch. So far we have a lot of success in that model with Microsoft, Nokia, even Google and others have given funds to continue Scratch. We believe that this model works pretty well for the kind of project that Scratch is and in the future I believe that that could be one of the most likely paths that Scratch would work.

Japan’s FlutterScape closes $177k seed round with Digital Garage

FlutterScape, the Tokyo-based social marketplace site, has closed a seed investment round worth 15 million yen (US$177,000) with JASDAQ-listed Digital Garage.

This is FlutterScape’s second investment this month. We broke the news earlier this month that it took US$100,000 from Japanese auctions aggregator Aucfan. The latest deal closed on 26 Aug.

Digital Garage is a pioneering Japanese web company. In the last few years it is most well-known as Twitter’s Japanese partner, recently signing Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to its advisory board.

Things have been moving quickly for FlutterScape, which exhibited at Echelon 2010 in June. Here’s our email interview with FlutterScape’s co-founder and chief executive Takehiro Kakiyama about the latest investment.

Who are you receiving funding from?

We received fund from Digital Garage Incubation.

How much funding? This is a seed round, correct?

From Digital Garage, we received ¥15 million (approx $177K) for our seed round and so far we raised a total of ¥25 million (approx. $300K).

What will the investor get in return?
A small portion of FlutterScape, Inc. equity.

What will you do with the money?
Working capital and marketing budget.

How did this deal come about? What’s the story leading up to it?
FlutterScape has sought and always will seek foreign network to be the world’s global company. Having netprice.com, one of the largest e-commerce websites in Japan, as our lead investor, I kindly asked Mr.Sato, CEO of netprice, for an introduction to Digital Garage. At the pitch, I found out that my first friend in Canada (I graduated from high school in Canada) turned out to be the son of Mr. Hayashi, CEO of Digital Garage group, and Mr. Hayashi, Mr. Sato and I were blown away by the fact that the world is so small. Then all the Digital Garage executives seated at the pitch really loved FlutterScape, in a meantime Digital Garage was seeking some startups from Japan that are global-minded pursuing the world class level of product. That’s how we came to click.

What other benefits do you hope to get out of this deal? Why did you choose to go with this investor?
I hope to leverage our business with their foreign network, prominent know-how and advice for startup, and social media expertise, including Twitter and Joi Ito’s insights.

When does the deal close?
August 26th, 2010.

Gaurav Oberoi on how to sell a startup

Gaurav Oberoi knows a thing or two about startups, and even more about making them successful, having started and sold BillMonk and Precision Polling in the US in the last four years.

BillMonk, which helped roommates split bills, was sold to Obopay and SurveyMonkey bought Precision Polling, which creates automated telephone polls. It wasn’t all a walk in the park, as Gaurav will explain when he discusses his experiences at Accelerate 2010.

We caught up with him before the event to get his thoughts on entrepreneurship and startup life.

Hear Gaurav Oberoi live at Accelerate 2010, Asia’s largest innovation conference on Sept 22-23. Book by 31 Aug for more than 30% off tickets. Use promo code ‘E27EARLY’.

On taking the risk of leaving employment for a startup:

The decision to leave Amazon [for first startup BillMonk] wasn’t easy, I went back and forth deciding. I was in my early twenties, freshly graduated (Computer Science from Rice University) and working at Amazon but I made the jump after careful thought.

I would say, looking back on my experience, that founding a startup isn’t the risk that many perceive it to be.

I was young and in a period of my life where I was as free from responsibility as I ever could be. If I was ever going to pursue my dream and start my own company, this was it.

Though I would leave my job, my employer was supportive – leaving the door open for a return – while finding another industry job would not be difficult given the experience I had.

Then there was development potential. Fail or succeed, the new experience would develop me beyond anything I could experience at Amazon.

On the preparation that went into founding Precision Polling, his second startup:

Before I left my job I talked to 25 or so contacts having already modelled the price and estimated roughly costs. When you have an idea, you need customer feedback to know your product target better. It is an old school technique that not enough people do these days.

After congealing the information from market research I concluded that I wasn’t crazy and people would actually pay for the service. Once I knew that I took the leap.

On what aspiring startup founders can learn:

There are a number of questions you need to answer.

If you take the leap what is the average revenue per user? How much will it cost to acquire customers?

If you have a product, build a model, then take a top, middle and low guess, you’ll be within 50% which is enough to get an idea of the potential of your product.

I estimated the average revenue of customer very conservatively, it turn out to be a lot higher, but even using my original estimates we had budget to go out and acquire customers through marketing and PR.

On the importance of an exit strategy:

Anytime you start a company you need to clearly identify your exits, even if it isn’t the immediate plan. If you’re going to go and speak to investors, who care about raising money, they will need to see an exit strategy.

If your story doesn’t jive into that, you’re going to have problems raising money, and if you don’t plan on raising money then you’re planning on never building growth.

On the value of PR, marketing and advertising for startups:

When we were ready to go public I spoke to Jeff (CEO of Twilio, the platform on which Precision Polling was built) and we agreed a Twilio post announcement which was put on Hacker News, to gauge interest, before we reached out to GigaOm, TechCrunch and others.

After reading the TechCrunch article (which heralded Precision Polling as “a Survey Monkey for the phone) a Survey Monkey guy biz dev guy signed up. I made sure to get hold of him over the phone and thank him for his interest, the conversation went from there and we were subsequently acquired by them.

TechCrunch gets the credit for broadcasting, we generated some new customers and other interest but advertising in our target verticals – such as political journals – really got us a return on investment. We also won a number of political awards, and other PR plays, which brought in news leads and carried us into our target market.

The TechCrunch article served more of a stake in the ground than PR, we knew this was a good idea and wanted to be the first to claim the concept and create mind share and VC buzz.

Koprol gets record 7,000 users from TV ad

Earlier this week Yahoo! debuted a television commercial to promote its Indonesian location-based social networking site Koprol. The commercial was aired for an Indonesian domestic audience.

As promised by Yahoo’s Indonesia country manager Pontus Sonnerstedt at a media event a few weeks ago, the ad features the Yahoo! ‘Purple Door’ which resembles, at least in function, the ‘Anywhere Door‘ from Japanese animation series Doraemon, which allowed the robot-cat protagonist and his companions the ability to traverse time and space. Doraemon is popular among television audiences in Southeast Asia.

The ad, which can be found on YouTube thanks to DailySocial, helped Koprol gain around 7,000 new sign-ups in a day. On 25 Aug Koprol announced that they gained even more users but did not provide a number.

Koprol iPad app

Koprol teased iPad users with a promise on 24 Aug that the full site will be an option on the tablet’s browser. However despite the image posted by founder Satya Witoelar on his Koprol account, choosing the ’standard view’ option takes you to an error page. Looks like there’s still some homework to do for the new Yahoo! recruits.

Telkomsel partnership

Koprol has signed up Telkomsel as an official partner in Indonesia. The mobile telco has set up three unmetered plans for subscribers to access Koprol for a small fee on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis as opposed to using the standard data plans.

Looks like signing up with Yahoo! has provided Koprol with a much needed boost with respect to their marketing efforts.

Win a stay at Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play Tech Centre

The Top 10 Apps picked by our judges from the pool of Asia’s Top 50 Apps will now win a new prize: Three months rent-free at Plug and Play Tech Centre in Silicon Valley.

Some of Plug and Play’s tenants at their Palo Alto Tech Centre include PayPal, Google, Logitech and even Singapore’s latest startup success story tenCube.

The three months at the tech centre just is part of the Plug and Play Accelerator program that the Top 10 Apps will win. Three months in the program usually costs US$6,500.

“The Plug and Play Accelerator program provides the opportunity for Asian startups to dive deep into the Silicon Valley ecosystem, essentially the high tech capital of the world,

“They will be able to engage with our VC and angel investor partners, talk to like minded technologists and other members of the high tech ecosystems and validate what they are doing,

“This will hopefully enable and accelerate their success,” said Jupe Tan, vice president of international relations at Plug and Play.

The full list of benefits is below.

3 months at Plug and Play Accelerator program

a. Plug and Play University (3 day entrepreneur boot-camp)
b. Plug and Play Investment Forum (1 day pitching event)
c. Venture Capital and other investor introductions (upon qualification)
d. Corporate and other strategic introductions (upon qualification)
e. Ongoing Business Relationship Manager support through monthly reviews
f. Strategic advice through bi-monthly reviews with senior management

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