Victoria Ho is a TechCrunch writer based in Singapore. She was previously the technology correspondent for The Business Times in Singapore, and senior writer for ZDNet Asia prior to that. She started out working for ComputerWorld and CIO Asia magazines, under the IDG and Fairfax Business Media brand.
She has an English Literature degree from the National University of Singapore.
Australian startup, Airtasker, is keen to expand out of its home country into Southeast Asia, which it says hasn’t been touched by large competitors yet. The year-old startup provides job matching for freelancers and employers, similar to what oDesk and Elance do. For its first steps outside of Australia, its first port of call will be Singapore, where it wants to hire two country managers. → Read More
MavenSay, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans as a result. The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge… → Read More
Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, SingTel, plans to set aside $1.6 billion (S$2 billion) over the next three years for startup acquisitions, it said in an earnings call (via ZDNet). It wasn’t clear on what those acquisitions would be specifically, but going by those it has made in recent years, we can expect the telco to continue focusing on digital content and augmenting its… → Read More
Pixel People, an iOS game, has raked in $700,000 over 2 million downloads in the span of three months, said the game’s maker, Lambdamu. The key to their success, according to a company spokesperson, was a distribution deal with Chillingo. → Read More
Singaporean price comparison startup Save 22 just got an investment of “mid six figures” in Singapore dollars, according to co-founder, Guyi Shen. S$500,000 translates to about US$400,000, as a reference. The three-year-old startup indexes prices of goods and displays a price comparison. Its mobile app also allows you to scan a barcode of a product with your phone, and it will display… → Read More
Software quality assurance testing on Android devices is far easier than it was just a year ago, at least according to one of Asia’s largest mobile app developers, Animoca. The Hong Kong company has produced over 300 apps since it started two years ago, and just shot past 150 million downloads collectively. It produces mainly Android apps. Last year, Animoca’s testing process for its… → Read More
Prepping for its U.S. expansion, Singapore-based indoor positioning technology firm YFind has launched a broader analytics tool so that its customers can slice and dice foot traffic information in malls.
The company’s service tracks unique visitors as they move through a mall. It relies on Wi-Fi to do this, so it can track users who have their Wi-Fi active on their phones. Because it doesn’t… → Read More
This is the ground floor of one of the electronics malls in Shenzhen’s famed Huaqiangbei district. Huaqiangbei is a stretch of large malls and shops in the Southern Chinese province, and due to its proximity to some of the manufacturing superfactories in the city, it has a cluster of malls that specializes in carrying tech goods. These electronics malls generally start out with booths on the… → Read More
Asia’s fragmented music fanbase and subscription habits may stand between Spotify and its total domination of the region, or at least so its competitors hope. The music streaming service recently launched in the Asian countries of Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. When we spoke to Spotify’s head of new markets in Asia-Pacific, Sriram Krishnan, he was evasive on how extensive the… → Read More
Zalora, Rocket Internet‘s pan-Asian fashion retail site, has launched an iOS app, as it seeks to capture the growing base of consumers in Asia who are using smartphones as their primary, and sometimes only, way of getting online. → Read More
Apps Foundry just announced that it has raised $2.42 million (S$3 million) in a Series B round of funding. The Indonesian company is registered and headquartered in Singapore, and this round of funding has come from Indonesia’s largest media group, Kompas Gramedia. The company’s main product is a digital newsstand app called Scoop. This round of funding will go towards Apps… → Read More
Inzen Studio, a small game startup in Singapore has just released an ambitious project called Game Show Warriors. The launch kicks off with the release of an iOS game called Amazing Studly Strikes, but the studio has quietly released the first two episodes of a Web comic, and episode three just dropped to accompany the release of the mobile game. The game app will also include the Web comic… → Read More
A Singapore clean-tech company called Gcorelab has just received $482,000 (S$589,000) in funding for a new technology that promises to control the thermal issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries. Battery packs that use lithium-ion cells such as those found in laptops and, in larger deployments like electric cars, can suffer from cells failing. When the cells do and overheat, they can cause… → Read More
Recruit.net just rebuilt its site and underlying engine, in the hopes of attracting new users. The job search site is an aggregator pulling listings from job databases and individual job listings on corporate sites. This is how it hopes to differentiate from larger competitors like Monster and JobStreet, which display listings that companies have specifically taken out on the job sites themselves. → Read More
Tencent’s WeChat messenger has made a larger play for the Singapore market, with the release of a TV commercial in the country. The Chinese commercial features two popular Taiwanese stars, and will air on the free-to-air Chinese channels in the country. Louis Song, country manager of Tencent’s international business group for Malaysia and Singapore, said the company hopes to gather more… → Read More
The white device here (pictured next to a phone for scale) is in the process of getting mounted on store walls in Singapore malls. When active, the device will emit an ultrasonic signal that an app can pick up, and will allow participating stores to broadcast deals and rewards to shoppers. The device is called the iSenze, and is made by a startup in Singapore called Rainmaker Labs. → Read More
Tencent’s social blogging site, Qzone, has Asia’s largest active social network user base, with 600 million (and counting) users who log in more than twice a month. Besides Qzone, the Chinese Internet giant is perhaps better known for its flagship QQ instant messenger and the exploding WeChat smartphone messaging app. I spoke to Peter Zheng, vice president of Tencent’s social… → Read More
Microsoft just scored a coup on the patent royalty front, with a new deal with Taiwanese phone maker, Hon Hai, which owns Foxconn. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will get paid a flat fee per Android and Chrome-based device that Foxconn makes. And there are a lot of those. A whopping 40 percent of the world’s phones come from the firm’s China-based factories. Foxconn is an ODM… → Read More
Dropmysite has beefed up its site backup product with new features, as it pushes harder into the enterprise market. Its product now includes features like incremental backups, public key authentication and PostgreSQL database support, it said. Backups start at 10Gb for $19.99. The Singaporean company was started in September 2011. But it was a side project, Dropmyemail that suddenly became a hit… → Read More
Music streaming service Spotify has finally come to Asia. Today, it announced that it would be launching in the cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Its premium service, priced at $9.99 per month in the US, will also be a little cheaper in the region, with Malaysians getting the lowest price. Update: after turning on Asia, Spotify posted on its blog that it now has also turned on services… → Read More
The results are in for Filipino accelerator IdeaSpace’s startup competition, and the top ten picks have a heavy focus on social projects. A glance at the list reveals a strong emphasis on environmental and health-related projects, especially those that will likely benefit the developing nation’s poorer regions. Armtech – affordable water purification machine for households DateCola… → Read More
Singapore beauty e-tailer, Luxola, just raised its Series A round from GREE Ventures. The amount was undisclosed, but has been rumored to be in the region of $2 million. The company carries about 60 brands of cosmetics and beauty products on its website, and ships to countries in Southeast Asia like Singapore and Malaysia. Its site was launched in September 2012, and it had previously raised a… → Read More
After some years of languishing, BillMonk’s service and user base will be taken over by a young Singapore startup, BillPin, which provides a similar bill-splitting service. Just over six months old, BillPin pitches itself as a “Mint for groups” and offers a way for people to track how much money they owe each other. It has plenty of competitors in the bill-splitting space… → Read More
A Singaporean sushi chain has acquired a game psychology company in what looks like an acquisition of the latter’s four founders. Standing Sushi Bar, which runs three outlets in Singapore and another in Jakarta, said it bought Gametize for an eight-digit sum. Gametize has a platform called GameMaki that gives clients a way to work challenges into their customer-facing services. It’s… → Read More
In the recent months, two new jobs sites in Asia have popped up with interesting new takes on the process of pairing jobseekers with potential employers. The stark difference between them and the likes of JobStreet and Monster highlight how much room there is for innovation in the traditional jobs classifieds scene. I’ve always found that cold calls tend to come from the most mismatched… → Read More
When Sequoia Capital India landed in Singapore quietly in 2012, the buzz around town was that a big-name US fund being in the country was going to really jolt the market and provide serious cred to the startups here. The Indian team running operations here, however, appears to have spent the last year of its time in the island state helping startups in its India portfolio expand into Singapore… → Read More
As it already warned, ZTE posted its second-straight quarterly loss, due to vastly trimmed margins in emerging markets, as well as contract delays and falling handset sales in China. It made a net loss of 1.14 billion yuan ($183 million) in the three months ended Dec. 31, compared with its net income of 991.16 million yuan a year prior. Sales in the fourth quarter also fell 16 percent to 23.5… → Read More
Catcha Group, a Malaysia-based investment firm has announced it will invest up to $150 million in Asean-based online businesses over the next five years. The funds will come both from the top as well as through the Catcha Group’s subsidiaries. The Asean region refers to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The company’s online assets are worth over $300 million… → Read More
Many of the brighter ideas coming out of tech startups in the Philippines are health-related, with a heavy slant on mobile technologies. Filipino incubator, IdeaSpace just whittled a list of 700 entries from startups down to just 20. These 20 will eventually be halved further. IdeaSpace is offering 10 slots to startups to get six months incubation support and funding of up to $120,000 (PHP 5… → Read More
Japanese group coupon buying site Luxa just closed its Series B funding of $5.3 million (500 million Yen) from JAFCO. The Japanese VC also backed Luxa’s Series A round in November 2010, when it put in the same amount. This brings Luxa’s total funding to $10.6 million since operations started in August 2010. Luxa is a daily-deals site like Groupon, but it positions itself towards the… → Read More
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