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.
PayPal phases out donations to foreign non-profits and charities from Singapore accounts starting tomorrow, the 21st of March, and will complete this by the end of the month. This decision is a result of PayPal failing to get a remittance license in the country from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. PayPal was able to offer remittance services over the years, till the governing body issued an… → Read More
Former Google China head, Kaifu Lee, has been tracking how many times his Weibo posts on Tencent and Sina have been censored and deleted, and has helpfully made a graph of the past 8 months. The outspoken investor has had his tweets deleted most often in the recent weeks because he was discussing the story on the 13,000 dead pigs found in a Shanghai river, as well as a session in the Chinese… → Read More
Chope has raised $2.5 million (S$3.2 million) in Series B funding. The round was led by local publishing house, Singapore Press Holdings, which now owns 27.8% of the startup, valued at $1.4 million (S$1.81 million). Chope operates a similar service to OpenTable, and allows restaurant bookings through its website and mobile apps. It provides a restaurant booking backend system licensed from a UK… → Read More
Jungle Ventures, a VC in Singapore, has added Alon Sobol as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR). Sobol was up till last year head of mobile partnerships for Facebook in Asia, and has been an advisor for Asian startups, Mobikon and Viki, in the past year. In Jungle Ventures, he will mentor the VC’s existing portfolio companies in its space, and work together with the company’s other partners to… → Read More
SAP just opened another co-innovation lab, this time in Singapore. The lab is its 21st globally, and the fourth in the Asia-Pacific region. The German software giant hopes it will allow member organizations to have a space to experiment with different hardware and software combinations, and provides its cloud infrastructure to them to back this. The aim, it says, is to encourage the creation of… → Read More
Chinese Android-based phone maker Xiaomi said it will produce 15 million handsets for this year, and expects no overstock. This is double the 7.19 million units that were sold in 2012, which netted the firm 12.6 billion RMB ($2 billion) in revenue after tax. Its CEO and founder, Lei Jun, said that the firm is going to produce as many handsets as it expects to sell, because it doesn’t intend to… → Read More
Video gaming for hours is exhausting, so surely it counts as some sort of workout too, right? One publication from Japan just estimated how many calories it takes to click a mouse button once. ‘Convert Anything To Calories’, published by PHP Science World Shinsho, has narrowed down a mouse click to 1.4 calories. This is based on an index finger at a volume of 10.8 cubic centimeters, with a… → Read More
iCarsClub, a service that allows people to rent out their cars by the hour just got a seed round of almost half a million, a little under three months since its launch. The Singapore-based startup provides a service similar to Zipcar, except car owners rent out their own vehicles and iCarsClub doesn’t own or provide the cars. The company will install a piece of hardware in members’… → Read More
Playcez, a startup out of Delhi, has closed a seed round of several hundred thousand USD $500,000 for an events discovery app for Indian users. It wouldn’t say how much funding it got exactly, but noted that the figure is under and closer to $1 million. Its founder, Ashwani Gaur, acknowledged that other location-based, social type apps for consumers have tapered off in the hype cycle in the… → Read More
YouTube plans to launch a music subscription service later this year, to allow people to listen to tracks online, and to possibly cut out the ads that precede each video for subscribers, according to Fortune. The largest storehouse of streaming video, YouTube relies on selling banner ads on the site and running short clips before each video, giving a cut back to record companies. YouTube has… → Read More
It seems the e-book market in Thailand has been quietly flourishing, at least according to a local provider of digital books and magazines, Ookbee. The company is the country’s biggest e-bookstore, with a claimed 88 percent market share. Its founder, Natavudh “Moo” Pungcharoenpong, said the local market is still very new and young, but added that it has amassed 3 million users so far, and is… → Read More
Singapore-based short term home rental marketplace, Travelmob is pushing steadily into the space with new features on its site. Today, it released a way for home owners to list last-minute discounts to travelers. This follows an earlier feature released last year which allowed travelers to find listings by descriptive tags. The company is yet another in the quickly crowding Airbnb-style space… → Read More
Mobile device management startup AirWatch has raised a massive series A round of $200 million, led by Insight Venture Partners. The startup competes with others such as Good Technology and SAP’s Afaria in the mobile device management space. This rides the current “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend, where companies are supporting employee-owned devices such as smartphones and laptops in the… → Read More
Foreign visitors going to North Korea will be able to receive uncensored 3G data starting March 1. Koryolink, a joint venture between Egyptian company Orascom Telecom Holding and North Korean state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation (KPTC), has set up a 3G service for visitors into the country. The service, which is not available to locals, won’t come cheap. A $100 Wi-Fi hotspot… → Read More
Handy, a smartphone rental service out of Hong Kong, has launched operations in Singapore. The company offers smartphones for rent to travelers at $9 (HKD 68) a day—$12 (S$15) a day in Singapore—and the price includes unlimited 3G data and international calls. The Handy brand comes under its CEO, Terence Kwok’s startup effort called Tink Labs, and is its first and only project thus far. The… → Read More
Russian phone maker Yota Devices will start making its first dual-screen e-ink YotaPhones in Singapore. The company has signed with Hi-P, a manufacturer in the country, to have it mass-produce the devices. Yota’s COO, Lau Geckler, told us that he is also in Singapore to help set up Yota’s Asian sales office and the company’s second R&D facility. Its original R&D center is… → Read More
Shopspot, a startup out of Thailand with a mobile shopping app, has won $628,000 (S$779,000) after switching its shopper matchmaking app to a more traditional shopping interface. Its earlier app focused on connecting individuals keen to sell their wares. The app would pair sellers and their goods with buyers based on geolocation. Released today, the new version bills itself as a “mobile… → Read More
PayPal will stop allowing personal payments in Singapore on February 20. It said in an email to members that this was due to “regulatory instructions”. People will still be able to make commercial payments for goods and services with their accounts, such as at online merchants, or receive funds, but we can expect that fund transfers between personal accounts will be halted. → Read More
A Singaporean fashion retail site has secured $1.6 million (S$2 million) in funding from a government-backed group of VCs. When it launches next month, the e-tailer, called Inverted Edge, will carry a consignment of goods from 36 Asia-Pacific designers, according to CEO, Debra Langley. The funding it received was from the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF), Incuvest, Accel-X and four… → Read More
Another service has jumped on the “easy” site creation bandwagon, this time a small startup out of the Philippines, called Infinite.ly. The company competes with players like Wix.com to offer the HTML-challenged a way to get a website up and running, and offers a number of drag-and-drop widgets to do so. Users are started off with a selection of templates which they can customize. → Read More
Just in time for Posterous’ closure on April 30th, a service has launched to bring Posterous blogs over to rival service, Tumblr. JustMigrate was announced the same day that Posterous unceremoniously called it quits via its blog. The service requires you to punch in your posterous URL, authorize it with Tumblr, and you’re all set. For those with multiple Tumblr blogs, granting… → Read More
It’s been a long journey for Bubble Motion, one of Singapore’s oldest startups. The company has been around since 2005 and made its name as a voice messenger app, allowing people to send voice clips to each other within text messages. Unlike with an MMS, the service requires no data. A user dials *7*, follows the phone commands and speaks. The recipient gets a text and “retrieves” the… → Read More
Singaporean media outfit, e27, has raised about US$615,000 (S$760,000) through a funding round with investors in the region, and plans to expand into Southeast Asia. The round was raised with B Dash Ventures from Japan, Pinehurst Advisors in Taiwan, Ardent Capital in Thailand and Dan Neary in Singapore. e27 has been around since 2006 and runs a news site on tech startups in Asia, and organizes… → Read More
Indonesian game developer, TouchTen, has been signed up as Gimmie’s exclusive game distributor in its country. Gimmie is a start-up by former lead programmer at PopCap Games, Roy Liu, and David Ng, who led business development at ChinaCache. The company employs a model typically found in fun fairs, which offers real prizes as rewards for playing. After a recent pivot away from Silicon Valley… → Read More
Samsung and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf have placed Samsung-branded NFC stickers in all 51 outlets in Singapore. Their marketing campaign runs from 8 February to 7 March, and will reward Samsung NFC-device users with an upsized drink for tapping the poster and Liking Coffee Bean’s Facebook page after it pops up. Right now, that means the Galaxy S3 or Note 2 devices, and you still have to Like… → Read More
Amazon wants to sell your used ebooks. It recently won a patent to allow people to hock off their read ebooks on its marketplace. Of course, ebooks don’t suffer from wear and tear, but think of the resale process as more of a way to transfer your book licences. This is already in action in a way—users can currently “lend” out Kindle books, which then disappear from your device as your… → Read More
It looks like just 10 percent of mobile data traffic will be based on 4G networks in 2017, according to Cisco Systems’ annual mobile forecast. It’s significant growth from the extent of today’s 4G deployments, which make up just 1 percent of global connections. But with 4G LTE devices like the iPhone 5 becoming common in larger economies, we may feel the technology rift between early adopter… → Read More
Japanese messaging app Line has just reported that new users in Hong Kong have been doubling each day for the past week since January 29.
The app, which is the dominant messenger of choice in Japan, launched its Chinese version on December 12, and looks like it’s riding a huge wave of momentum in Asia, ranking first on the free app category in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand, to… → Read More
Uber has brought its premium taxi calling app to Singapore—the first country in Asia to get it. The company has been trialing its service here for the past week. According to users who have tried it out here, it runs Mercedes Benz S-Class sedans, setting it above the usual smaller Toyota cabs that the dominant service, ComfortDelGro runs. Of course, it charges a premium for the luxury, and fares… → Read More
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