Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace that’s often referred to as the “Amazon of India,” has raised another $160 million. This is an extension of the $200 million raise announced in July of this year, with the final $360 million Series E round the largest ever to be raised by an Internet startup in India. It brings the total raised by Flipkart since 2007 to $540 million. → Read More
Hong Kong based startup Verbase — currently billing itself as “a search engine with clean and pure results” — reckons it has a chance to inch into the search market by offering something different to category leader Google. Namely: no ads, no spam and, down the line, crowdsourced content to augment its core search results. → Read More
Mobile messaging app Line, which has been on a marketing push in India, has added 10 million Indian users to its registered users count in around three months, as it prepares to kick off a Bollywood actress-backed TV ad campaign in the country. Since officially launching in India, Line said voice calls on its service have grown 3,200 %, use of stickers is up 1,800%, and messages have grown by… → Read More
It’s a tale of two very different fortunes in the mobile-making market. HTC has today announced preliminary results for its Q3, recording a net loss of around $101 million on total revenues of $1.6 billion — the veteran mobile maker HTC’s first ever quarterly loss. With Samsung it’s the opposite story today: it says it’s expecting record profits in its fiscal quarter. → Read More
Update: An earlier version of this story had a headline that suggested only one of GO Launcher’s apps had 80 million monthly active users, when that user base is, in fact, spread across all of its apps. As I’ve written about before, while the Chinese startup scene is sometimes criticized for producing copycats of Western businesses, there are emerging entrepreneurs building software… → Read More
Pakistan is known for a long-standing ban on YouTube and occasional blocks of sites like Facebook and Twitter. Today, the government in one large part of the country said that it was planning to block two more social media services — Skype and Viber. → Read More
Elliptic Labs, a startup that uses ultrasound technology to enable touchless, gesture-based interfaces, has finally pushed its tech into smartphones. It’s been demoing this at the CEATEC conference this week but today it’s announcing the launch of its first SDK for Android phones. Elliptic’s tech is able to work with any ARM-based smartphone, and it expects commercial devices to land next year. → Read More
Israel’s startup scene has taken another big step forward today. Pitango Venture Capital, the Israel-based investment company behind like Apple-acquired Anobit, Samsung-acquired Boxee and many others, has closed a $270 million fund, which it will use to back “Israeli companies and companies with an Israeli nexus” that may otherwise be operating in the U.S. and Europe, according to Chemi Peres… → Read More
The allure of top-tier Western universities isn’t lessening anytime soon for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese high school graduates emerging out of the country’s best schools. That’s why a host of different startups helping mainland high school students with admissions like InitialView have cropped up in the last year or two. Chasefuture, a one-year-old startup from serial… → Read More
In a move that could ease paper money’s stranglehold over the Indian economy and society, Mobikwik is releasing a mobile wallet for the country’s burgeoning Android smartphone-class to digitally buy goods directly from merchants. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is empowering payment companies to facilitate more digital transactions in order to create some competitive tension for existing players… → Read More
An app that lets people play the stock market without the risk of losing any real money has turned its virtual cash game into a pile of actual Benjamins, by closing out a $10 million funding round. The app in question, TradeHero, is made by a Singapore-based developer MyHero. Investors in the round are Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers China fund (KPCB China) and IPV Capital. → Read More
Hot on the heels of its merger with rival ShoeDazzle (yes, pun intended), subscription-based fashion commerce site JustFab, now with 35 million users, is once again adding to its coffers, to pick up the pace on international growth. Today the company is announcing that it has raised $40 million in a Series C round of funding. → Read More
The year-long saga of the Pakistan government’s YouTube ban has just taken another twist, as a case to unblock the website has been referred to a panel of Lahore High Court justices who will now decide whether the country’s haphazard internet censorship regime is unconstitutional. It’s another reprieve for the government’s IT minister Anusha Rehman, who has overseen an increasingly oppressive… → Read More
An unauthorised app that lets Android users chat on Apple’s closed iMessage network is causing a big stir. It’s had viral downloads in the tens of thousands amid claims that it could be spreading malware; but the Chinese developer who developed the app tells us everything is cool. → Read More
The largest mobile messaging apps are increasingly social platforms in their own right. There is more evidence of that today as Line Corporation has added yet another feature to its platform play. Snap Movie allows for Vine-style short video sharing within Line, which gives users yet another way to communicate with each other without having to leave the social, entertainment playground. → Read More
App developers are struggling to make money in India because of low credit card penetration, according to Michael Stencl, CEO of maps provider Sygic, which has now dropped the $5.58 fee to download its GPS navigation app. As Indian Android owners remain reluctant to purchase apps, mapping providers are turning to features such as offline availability to compete with Google, which has grown in… → Read More
After ignoring repeated requests to appear in a court case challenging the Pakistan government’s year-long YouTube blackout, the country’s elusive IT minister is expected to appear at a hearing later this month to outline plans to drop the blanket ban — and instead selectively restrict “blasphemous” and “offensive” material on the video-sharing site. However, activists have decried the move as a… → Read More
FoodieQuest is an app in the making that wants to turn the craze for taking photos of food — second only to the selfie in the photo-sharing hierarchy — into a sticky social game. The app will let users snap a photo of their dinner and then pit it against another dish pic taken by someone else. It’s like hot or not for food — or piping hot/undercooked, to stick with the culinary theme. → Read More
Looks like Recruit Co, the Japan-based HR and recruitment site giant that has long been gearing up for an IPO, is on the acquisition trail again, just a month after buying NuGrid in India and a year after its acquisition of Indeed.com. According to sources close to the situation, it has made a $400 million offer for Freelancer.com, an online portal that connects people with short-contract jobs. → Read More
Ali Rehan and his university cohorts had just won Pakistan’s Startup Weekend hackathon when they decided to quit their PhD research project to build a photography app. Weeks later they were offered a $100,000 investment for 60 percent equity in Eyedeus, as their fledgling startup is called. The money on its own was a tantalising offer in Pakistan’s nascent ecosystem, but it would mean ceding… → Read More
Apple has sent out a second round of event invitations to media today – this time directed specifically at Chinese publications and journalists, for a follow-up event to their September 10 shindig at Apple Campus in Cupertino. The invites have the same graphic as the original, but will occur September 11 at 10 AM CST at Beijing’s World Trade Center. This marks the first time Apple has held a… → Read More
Xiaomi, the break-out smartphone star of the Greater China market, is receiving lots of attention thanks to the somewhat salacious tale of ex-Android VP Hugo Barra and his recent move to the Chinese company. Xiaomi is looking to sell around 20 million smartphones by the end of 2013, and is doing so well that it’s challenging Samsung, a formerly dominant force among OEMs, at home in China.
The… → Read More
Returning for his fourth and final visit to the Indian offices that would grant him a coveted five-year business visa, social entrepreneur Alex Stevens* was confident his wild goose chase was almost at an end. However, facing the elusive supervisor, he was greeted with an awkward smile, a head tilt from side-to-side, and, “sorry, you can’t get your visa now, please come back in some time.” → Read More
Transportation tech startup Uber is continuing its aggressive expansion across Asia. As of this week, it is now live in India, starting first with a luxury car service in its tech capital, Bangalore. The subcontinent may boast a potential market of over a billion, a rising middle class and 164,000 millionaires, but these are silver linings to some possibly darker storm clouds: low credit card… → Read More
Four Indians are exposing India’s sexual harassment hotspots via Safecity, a website for victims to anonymously report when and where they were abused. The founders hope that it could be the first step to address the cultural stigma of reporting assaults. → Read More
HTC’s Hail Mary play might not take the form of another new smartphone: The Taiwanese company is reportedly working with Chinese government officials to build a mobile OS that includes “deep integration” with China-specific services like Weibo, aimed specifically at the Chinese market. The project could see the new mobile OS launch before year’s end, according to the Wall Street Journal, which… → Read More
Philippines carrier Globe Telecom is extending a previous unlimited access bundle it began offering last July, with Viber, to include five more messaging services: Facebook Messenger, Kakao Talk, WhatsApp, WeChat and Line. Many carriers in emerging markets offer bundled access to one or two core mobile messaging players, but it’s interesting to see a telco offer access to so many OTT players. → Read More
Flipkart, the largest e-commece site in India, has been likened to Amazon both for what it offers and its presence in the market. But it has one crucial difference: because credit cards are not that ubiquitous, and Indian consumers generally distrust the idea of paying online, Flipkart has built its business on a cash-on-delivery model, where users order books, electronics and more online but pay… → Read More
India’s budding democracy has dipped its toe into the digital waters, as the government launched a website allowing citizens to file Right To Information requests online. It digitises a popular legislative mechanism which forces public officials to release documents and files relating to ministerial and bureaucratic decisions and taxpayer spending. Over the past eight years the RTI has empowered… → Read More
Drones don’t have the best reputation on the subcontinent and in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, sandwiched between war-torn regions of Pakistan, Kashmir, and Nepal, villagers no doubt harbour suspicions of the remote-controlled flying beasts. However, local startup Social Drones is using its home-grown arsenal of bi, quad, and octo copters for good, surveying the effects of a recent natural… → Read More
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