Roundup: 20 startups pitching at Startup Asia

April 4, 2013 by SGE  

Twenty startups will be taking the stage to pitch at Startup Asia, an exciting tech startup conference held at Biopolis in Singapore. The prize: USD 10,000 in cash. The 20 companies, which come 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 application to help communities and groups of friends share photos in a simple way with collaborative group photo albums. 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. 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 rewarding consumers for buying and sharing music, ebooks, videos, apps and games.

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. CEO 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. 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. Co-founder and CEO: Michael Michelini.

Xunta: an online dating site for 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. Principal: Janice Wilson.

Indonesia

DealPOS: Fluid Web Solutions is developing an online Point of Sale (POS) software for retailers. Deployment complexity, scalability, heavy investment, bad user experience are the four problems it is solving. 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. 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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Roundup: 20 startups pitching at Startup Asia