April 4, 2013 by SGE
Lots of Buttons has won the Startup Asia Arena battle this year, winning USD 10,000 in cash. The startup operates a button store that helps crafters and manufacturers find what they need with the ease and convenience of online shopping and prices typically 50% below convention.
Startup Asia isa tech startup conference held at Biopolis in Singapore, which together with Echelon are the biggest ones in the country.
The 2012 winner was Teamie, a student collaboration platform.
Twenty startups from 9 countries were picked from over 300 submissions. Here’s a roundup of the 20:
Malaysia
Netizen Testing: the company is developing an online usability test tool powered by crowdsourcing to help startups and online businesses find out where users are confused and why they are leaving the target website. The results allow clients to fix their usability issues and increase their conversion rates. The service already has a number of users, including social networking site Friendster and news site Malaysiakini. Founder: Alvin Chai.
RichMediaAds.com: the company has built an online tool to create interactive rich media display ads for budget advertisers and small publishers to increase the quality of their ad campaigns. In place of banner ads, users can create websites-within-websites to increase user engagement. It already has funding, partnerships, and paying customers, but does not yet have data comparing animated banner ads with its product. CEO: Alvin Koay. Check out SGE’s coverage of RichMediaAds.
Hong Kong
Mmixr: a cloud-based, all-in-one presentation management tool to help companies to create, manage and share animated and branded presentations. It wants to be the iTunes for slides and presentations, where users can purchase stock images directly from within the app and use it for their slides. It’s working on a freemium model. Managing Director: David Francois.
Lots of Buttons: a button store that helps crafters and manufacturers find what they need with the ease and convenience of online shopping and prices typically 50% below convention. Buttons have high margin, small form factor making them cheap to ship, and inaccessible to crafters at the moment.
Lots of Buttons aims to be the world’s largest online crafts store, and is expanding to bigger verticals like beads and ribbons pending profitability (within 2 months) or angel investment. Its March sales are USD 13k, with an average order size of USD 25 but a customer acquisition cost of USD 10. Through its network of suppliers in China, it is able to ship buttons to customers without holding inventory, acheiving gross margins of 70 percent.
Singapore
DodoHub: a website to helps people build good habits through progress visualization and community support. It plans to monetize using a freemium model. It’s similar to United States’ Lift. Founder and developer: Hu Chen.
Pix Bento: a mobile and web app to help communities and groups of friends share photos in a simple way with collaborative group photo albums. It’s kind of like a Dropbox for photos and images. It offers a premium, subscription-based version that offers public albums which may be used by event or wedding organizers. The startup is currently bootstrapping. Chief Rainmaker: Kelvin Koh.
Shopbust: a realtime shopper feedback platform to help retail brands to improve their customer service and brand implementation by crowdsourcing mystery shop store audits online. It has 12k shoppers on the platform, with a realized revenue of USD 115K. The startup has already received angel funding. Founder and CTO: Saad Kamal.
Cinnamon: The company is developing Seconds, a multidevice (smartphones and tablets) application to help smartphone camera users skip all of the annoying steps insharing photos, with a fully automatic user experience and high speed photodata exchange backbone. President: Hajime Hotta.
Triibe: A startup that’s developing a mobile feedback tool to help restaurants and hotels to transform customer feedback into future profits. It does this by making it easy to gather feedback, reward customers for doing so, and acting on the feedback. It is working with over 60 businesses in Singapore.
Tell My Friends: a social network marketing and direct selling platform that counters online piracy of digital products by paying consumers for buying and sharing music, ebooks, videos, apps and games. Think of it as MLM for music sales: Users get paid more if more people buy what they share, and that goes down the line. Consumers can cash out only after a certain figure is hit, although they have the option of using the digital currency to buy other music or donate it away. It currently has over 600 registered users and over 2,000 paid downloads.
Thailand
Zocial: A company that helps brands understand what local people are saying in Southeast Asia across various social networks and thus turning these data into actionable steps to improve their business. Its clients include a Cable TV company. It had around 40 clients so far and is already making a profit. Co-founder: Warat.
SocialHappen: A retail marketing technology to help retailers get more foot traffic and repeat customers. It uses a hardware device to scan users that shCEO and founder: Charkrid Thanhachartyothin.
Pombai: A company that’s building an application for intercity bus companies to bring their offline tickets online and sell directly to consumers. It has support for multiple languages, digital payments, and advanced reservations. The service is similar to RedBus in India. CEO: Joe Fink.
China
Social Agent: a social media sales tool to help businesses find, track and manage sales leads starting with the 350+ million users on Sina Weibo. It’s targeting foreign businesses in China, as well as overseas companies that are entering China. Co-founder and CEO: Michael Michelini.
Xunta: an online dating site for gays in China. It connects individuals through web and mobile platforms. It plans to implement a freemium model. Premium features include voice chat and priority profile placement. It currently has 60,000 users (MAU of 30 percent) without any marketing. There’s a potential market size of 30 million gays in China. Founder: Sense Luo.
Cambodia
Puddding: A startup that’s developing a social commerce site to help women who are not models find a pair of jeans that fit with customized, ‘chicksourced’ recommendations based upon shared physical perks and quirks. It’s solving a similar problem as Get Fitt, except that the startup is looking at T-shirts. Principal: Janice Wilson.
Indonesia
DealPOS: Fluid Web Solutions is developing an online subscription Point of Sale (POS) software for retailers. It is solving four problems: Deployment complexity, scalability, heavy investment, and bad user experience. It can be accessed from any mobile device. It is focusing on the Indonesia market at the moment. Founder and CEO: Nelsen Lim.
8villages: a mobile-based customer relationship management platform to help companies advertise and collect market intelligence to and from rural consumers in emerging markets. CEO: Mathieu Le Bras.
Israel
Hoozin: a group messaging app with a unique approach capturing real life group dynamics. Unlike other chat apps, Hoozin is built from the ground up to cater to group interactions. Co-founder: Udi Zohar.
India
Framebench: A tool that lets creative teams across the world collaborate better by combining the power of online real-time meetings with the flexibility of email style conversations. It’s like Google Docs for videos. Features include: change tracking, file versioning, and one click integrations.
Over 3,000 files have been reviewed with 15,000 annotations. It currently has over 2,600 users, and has raised funds from Blume Ventures and other angel investors. Here’s a TechCrunch article on Framebench. 30 percent of visitors convert by registering for the service, although none are paying as it hasn’t launched paid plans yet. Founder and CEO: Rohit Agarwal.
Find out more about SGE’s research arm: SGE Insights, providing customized in-depth research reports to help you navigate the business of technology in Asia.
About The Author
SGE – (SGE)
Covering the Singapore and Southeast Asia startup and entrepreneurship scene since 2005.
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Lots of Buttons wins Startup Asia Arena battle and USD10K; plus a roundup of ...
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