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.
At first glance, the similarities between PicMix and Instagram are obvious. Both apps are photo sharing platforms with simple, square Polaroid-esque aesthetics, and display photos from friends in streaming feed. But while Instagram is figuring out how to monetize, Indonesian startup, PicMix seems to have nailed it from the get-go. PicMix makes it part of the core photo posting process for users to… → Read More
It seems a week doesn’t go by without finding out about a malfunctioning Jawbone Up band. The wearable step tracking bracelet measures how much you move each day and how well you sleep.
It was relaunched late last year in the US, and came to Asia in March. → Read More
There has been a growing rate of exits happening for Asian e-commerce companies, but valuations remain small on average. Most are under the $50 million mark, according to CB Insights’ latest report. The report, which provides a broad sweep of the past three years of activity in the region, showed that most activity—unsurprisingly—was happening in the large markets of India and China. But… → Read More
Malaysia is an easy place to get cheap, good, English-speaking talent, with overheads that are often far lower than in more advanced markets in Southeast Asia. But it continues to suffer the effects of brain drain. Simply put, Malaysia isn’t cool to be in for some of the nation’s brightest, and this has hurt its startup scene, according to Khailee Ng. Ng, who is from Malaysia, was… → Read More
Indian housing marketplace, Housing.co.in has expanded out of its home base of Mumbai into another major Indian city, Bangalore—its fifth city in the country. The company, which operates similarly to Trulia and Zillow, provides a real estate search site which displays a visual map of available housing for rent or sale. The search results are filtered by how many rooms are available per property… → Read More
Waygo has just won Most Promising Startup at the Echelon conference 2013 in Singapore. The judging panel of seven included Dave McClure, founding partner at 500 Startups, Edgar Hardless, CEO of SingTel Innov8 and John Scull, managing director at Southern Cross Venture Partners. Waygo makes an optical character reader (OCR) translation app which so far has focused on translating the Chinese… → Read More
Nimbuzz is continuing its push for South Asian dominance with its latest telco partnership. The Indian messaging startup just announced a tie-up with Hutch in Sri Lanka, offering six months of free Nimbuzz usage to Hutch subscribers. Today’s announcement is just another in a steady string of telco partnerships that the company has been striking up. In May, it linked up with Mobilink in… → Read More
The Pirate3D Buccaneer printer hit its Kickstarter goal of $100,000 in just 10 minutes after launch. At time of writing, it’s been roughly 15 hours since the campaign was started, and it’s already hit $282,356. The 3D printer from the Singapore-based startup is pitched as a beginner’s foray into 3D printing, although it prints at a decent resolution of 100-microns (similar to… → Read More
Get ready, get set, Kickstart. The Pirate3D Buccaneer printer is up on Kickstarter, and the first 350 backers will be able to get it for just $247—$100 off its regular price of $347. The 3D printer is targeted at home users and beginners, say its founders. One of our editors, John Biggs, had his doubts on how high-quality the printer’s output would be, noting some jagged edges to the… → Read More
Collabspot, an email CRM startup, has just received $79,000 (S$100,000) from a former mentor, Laurent Gasser, who also joins the company as director of business development. Collabspot provides a service that layers CRM (customer relationship management) software into Gmail. It’s targeted at the SME crowd, and promises to simplify data entry by letting workers save emails into the company… → Read More
Just four days after Yahoo-owned Flickr unveiled a brand-new upgrade, the site is experiencing major downtime for some—but not all—users. Flickr tweeted its acknowledgement of the site going down, about two hours ago. Experiencing slowness or having trouble accessing the site? We’re on it, and are working to fix the issue as quickly as possible. #badpanda — Flickr (@Flickr) May 24… → Read More
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
SeedAsia, an equity crowd-funding site based in China, has just launched. The company is offering stakes in selected early-stage startups to people. “It’s kind of a hybrid between Kickstarter and private investment,” said co-founder Tom Russell. The startups to be listed would have ideally gone through some some sort of incubation program and would have shown promise. They can… → 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 Dowson Tong, president of Tencent’s social network… → 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
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