25 Startups in Asia That Caught Our Eye
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. Alternatively, you can submit tips here and/or your startup here. Enjoy!
1. Zodio | Thailand by Joshua Kevin
Zodio, the Thailand-born startup founded by Jai Govindani, is a company that aspires to be the Yelp of Asia. Would it work?
2. DSYR | Malaysia by Willis Wee
Founded by Ben Chin and Kian Howe, Malaysia-based startup DSYR (stands for “Design Styles Year Round”) combines flash sales with wonderfully designed products. Or some might call it, the “Fab.com clone” of Malaysia.
3. Hometown | Pakistan by Willis Wee
Based in Pakistan, Hometown claims to be the first e-commerce site selling handmade leather products in the country.
4. LakuBgt.com | Indonesia by Enricko Lukman
Indonesian startup LakuBgt.com, whose name stands for “Laku Banget” (meaning “really sells a lot” in English), essentially helps online sellers set up better-looking shops with online payment systems on Facebook.
5. Weico | China by Steven Millward
Weico’s Windows Phone app is in beta and for WP users it will soon allow you to use the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo service without having to go via Sina’s own app.
6. Movin Studio | Indonesia by Joshua Kevin
Movin Studio, a game and mobile app studio based in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, has just launched its first game called, Rolling Babaa, a child-oriented physics-based puzzler.
7. Psoda | New Zealand by Willis Wee
Psoda is five year old startup from New Zealand that offers online management tools that help you manage projects. It is an interesting startup because, well, it basically covers the entire tedious project management all the way from idea generation, to planning, to execution, to testing, and roll-out.
8. Joome | China by Steven Millward
Chinese startup Joome aims to create a platform for people to open up their wifi hotspots to users, for free, and for no financial return.
9. Nubefy | Singapore by Willis Wee
Eight months later after some funding from the Singapore government, Nubefy the cloud management platform is finally now in private beta.
10. CloudyRec | Singapore by Willis Wee
Singapore-based CloudyRec is offering some mobile app developers SGD 1,000 (US$805) to use its backend cloud-hosting service. So if you’re looking to build an app or game on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Adobe Flash, and/or Unity3D, you may consider this as an opportunity.
11. Ticket | Indonesia by Joshua Kevin
Tiket, a startup that serves as a ticket booking platform for almost everything, has added yet another offering: train ticket booking.
12. Ookbee | Thailand by Willis Wee
One of the more popular startups in Thailand, Ookbee is an ebook store platform which claims to have over 85 percent market share in the country. It works as a standalone store and also partners with other big boys — like AIS, the largest telco in Thailand, and also B2S, the nation’s leading bookstore — to establish online ebook stores.
13. Weibo Bridge | China by Charlie Custer
Do you wish your weibo feed had more advertisements on it? Yeah, neither do I, but advertisers sure do, especially when those ads are coming from users you trust and chose to follow. That’s where Chinese startup Weibo Bridge comes in.
14. Excite | Japan by Enricko Lukman
Japanese online service provider Excite recently launched its advertising-based points program called Excite Points, claiming to be the first of its kind user reward system in Indonesia. We talked to Nobu Kiyohara, the business development group manager of Itochu Corporation, the biggest stakeholder of Excite Japan, about the company’s expansion plans in the country.
15. Ivali | China by Charlie Custer
StartOS is a Linux-based system that’s targeted at Chinese users and boasts simplicity and stability as its primary advantages.The OS — available as a free download — can apparently be installed from a Windows machine with extreme ease and remarkable speed.
16. Vidinterest | Nepal by Willis Wee
Nepal-based Vidinterest.com adopted the Pinterest idea of a social pinboard, but focuses just on video sharing and discovery. It is essentially a skin for YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion videos but I must say that it does help me find videos that I like.
17. Eventifier | India by Willis Wee
Eventifier, is an India-based startup that aims to archive your events automatically. All you have to do is to submit your event and allow Eventifier to track your event through your hashtag.
18. Zopim | Singapore by Steven Millward
Singapore’s Zopim.com makes a customer service live chat web app, and its staffers have been extra busy this Singaporean National Day prepping to rollout version 2.0 of the site that banishes Adobe Flash in favour of HTML5.
19. NoLimit | Indonesia by Iqbal Farabi
NoLimit offers social media sentiment analysis/reporting service focusing on Bahasa Indonesia who rolled out some new and cool features this week.
20. Noroshi | Japan by Rick Martin
Webnet IT Corporation, the operators of the multilingual invoicing system Makeleaps, has announced this week that it has acquired Noroshi, a competing quoting/invoicing service from 7-bites that caters to freelancers and small businesses in Japan.
21. Highrisepro | Malaysia by Willis Wee
Made in Malaysia, Highrisepro is a SaaS for property management, specifically for condominiums. It does a load of things for building management and property developers ranging from online payment, SMS notifications, and online booking of facilities.
22. Maskool.in | Indonesia by Enricko Lukman
Maskool.in launched this week and its e-commerce store is now open to the public . Behind Maskool.in, it turns out, is the company PT. Rocktokom, which also built the social recommendation site Rockto.
23. MalesBanget.com | Indonesia by Enricko Lukman
Claiming to be the original humor website in Indonesia, MalesBanget.com, or MBDC as it calls itself for short, is indeed a pretty funny website. Some of it is hilarious. The website name actually means “very lazy,” it started in 2003 and focuses on funny pictures, online videos, and web series - putting the site years ahead of the likes of Reddit or Icanhascheezburger.
24. Commute.ph | Philippines by Raya Edquilang
In a nutshell, Commute.ph’s founders describe it in this way: It is a commuting guide for Filipinos. It provides detailed directions that include step-by-step routes to take, what to ride, and how much. The directions provided are crowdsourced and driven by the community.
25. Bu Yi | China by Charlie Custer
The idea of starting an e-commerce site that just sells one thing a day isn’t exactly new. Nor is the idea of making that thing a t-shirt. But can the formula be successfully copied to China? The self-described “design nuts” behind Bu Yi, a new Chinese shirt-a-day startup with a user-generated design twist, are hoping so.
That’s all for this week, folks! (See last week’s list here.) For our full coverage of the hottest and most innovative startups in the region, you can click here or subscribe to our Asia startups RSS feed. For tips and news, sent us a note via editors[at]techinasia.com
