Singapore-based tech blog e27 is holding Echelon 2012 on June 11-12, a startup event the site calls the biggest of its kind in Asia.

As in previous years, Echelon will take place in Singapore (the first one was organized back in 2010), and the main event is preceded by a number of lead-up events in various countries.

These so-called Satellites already took place in the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Taiwan. The goal here is to identify cool startups for the Startup Marketplace exhibition at Echelon proper in June.

And now, it’s Japan’s turn.

Here are all details for the Echelon 2012 Japan Satellite event:

Date and time:
April 27 (this Friday), 2012 – from 10am-5pm

Venue:
Open Network Lab, Inc.
Daikanyama DG Building, Ebisu-minami 3-5-7, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Google Maps

Registration (free admission):
link to registration in English
link to registration in Japanese/English on ATND

Event details:
9.00am : Registration starts
10.00am : Opening remarks by e27
10.10am : Opening Speech by Mr Mikihiro Yasuda, Open Network Labs
10.20am : Keynote – Case study of a successful Startup Pivot by Simon Newstead
10.40am : Keynote by Mr Yasuhiko Yurimoto, Global Brain
11.00am : Startup Pitches 1
12.30pm : Lunch
1.30pm : Keynote, The BlackBerry Opportunity by Alan Wong
1.50pm : Keynote by Sandeep Cassi
2.10pm : Keynote – An overseas experience for Japanese startups by Hiromichi Ando
2.30pm : Startup Pitches 2
4.00pm : Results and announcements

full list of speakers
full agenda

event hashtag:
#echelon2012

I am expecting the event to hit full capacity very soon, so if you’re interested, you should register as soon as possible.

Event: Echelon 2012 Japan Satellite In Tokyo This Friday (April 27)

Almost a month ago, there was an international technology and start-up showcase event, which is called Echelon, at the National University of Singapore. Because of many things to do remaining after the event, I delayed making a write-up on it.

I think this year’s Echelon was its second edition, and that took place on June 16 and 17. Here’s a brief wrap-up.

Startup Launchpad (Part 1)

•  Cardinal Blue (a photo collage app for iPhone/iPad) – Taiwan
• WorkCrowd (a free social network for your workspace) – Malaysia
• SixReps (a social network for fitness and sportenthusiasts) – Indonesia
• JellyBus (a developer of Android-based funny apps) – Korea
• Fetch Fans (A web-based assistant to help your Facebook/Twitter designs) – Singapore
• Bouncity (A location-based gaming platform where users can hunt for bounty from participating brands and get rewards)

Startup Launchpad (Part 2)

• Moglue (A desktop platform that allows publishers, amateur authors to create interactive stories for iOS and Android devices) – Korea <See this story for more>
• Second CRM (A web-based CRM software especially for SMEs in Asia) – Malaysia
• Price Area (A shopping search engine to help you find the best deals) – Indonesia
• LocoBuzz by Spatial Ideas (an analytics, query and communications platform which integrates news and tweets onto a geographical map) – India

• [The Launchpad Winner] PlayMoolah (a web service for kids to master their money) – Singapore

Exhibitors’ Booths…

Garbs, a Tokyo-based start-up that helps you recruit potential colleagues using their Facebook app.

Compath.me, a location-based smartphone app that allows you to find discoveries near-by that the other users have posted and you may be interested in.

Makible, a Hongkong-based start-up for making niche products.  They connect with online communities to pre-order-crowd sourced products they make and distribute.  Founded by Jonathan Buford and Nicholas Wang.

Panel…

I was invited to Lisa Katayama’s panel featuring Japanese tech scene, and we talked about the latest developments on the Japanese web industry.  Also I gave some words to Asian start-ups who eagerly go into Japanese market.  From left to right, Lisa Katayama (Tokyo Mango), Ian McFarland (Digital Garage), me, Jon Yonghook Cockle (CookPad) and Brian Ritchie (Mind Valley, Malaysia).  Photo courtesy: e27.

After the event…

Penn Olson, a Singapore-based tech blog which I’ve been contributing for, had a party in the central Singapore, where four Japanese start-ups including Cacoo, Fashion Style Japan, Compath.me and Moso had an opportunity to present. You can find videos shooting it here[J].

Just heard Asiajin co-founder Akky is planning to stay in Singapore for several weeks next month. If you’re interested in meeting him and making friendship, I recommend you to drop him a line.

Event Wrap-up: Echelon 2011 And More, A Visit To Singapore In June

Singapore is very hot on tech throughout this week, since Echelon 2011, one of the largest tech conference in South East Asia, will be taking place at the National University of Singapore, where the region’s best start-up companies and services will be chosen by well-known authorities. We will join it as a media attendee and bring you live coverage.

Following the event, on the Friday evening (June 17), a Singapore-based blog covering the Asian tech scene, Penn Olson will host a meet-up, and they give Japanese four tech start-ups a chance to pitch their innovative ideas to tech geeks, Internet celebrities and investors who will have come from all across Asia.  Applications for the meet-up have been already closed, but we’re expecting to bring you a live streamcast or a live blogging from it.

Participating start-ups are:

• Fashion Style Japan: Yoshio Narita, CEO & Founder of Qomune (See this for more)
• Compath: Hiromichi Ando, CEO & Founder (w/ his colleagues)  (featured in this story)
• Moso: Shinji Murakoshi, CEO & Founder of Moso (featured in this story)
• Cacoo: Shinsuke Tabata, Managing Dir. & co-founder of NuLab, Inc. (See this for more)

Furthermore, on Saturday at 7pm (Singaporean time), at Hackspace.SG which is located at the heart of the country’s Arabic district, we will have a casual meet-up with people of the hackerspace and the four start-ups mentioned above. I’m intended not to create an agenda nor time schedule.  But if you are interested in talking with these guys in person, please come and join us. (Plancast)   I’m looking forward to tasting great meals by Meng Weng Wong there, who is the hackerspace’s director and also known for being very good at cooking.

See you all there.

See Also:

• Update: Asiajin To Host Reader Meet-up In Singapore On Saturday
• Echelon 2011: Applications For Asia’s Leading Launchpad Program Closing In Two Weeks
• Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up in Singapore

Meet Japanese Start-ups on Fri and Sat in Singapore

Echelon, Asia’s leading web technology event which is annually organized by Singapore’s tech news media and our friend e27, is scheduled to take place in June at the National University of Singapore.   Its satellite events will be held in Jakarta (Indonesia), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and Singapore in April to select the best tech start-up companies/services to be showcased at the main event in June.

Currently applications for their launchpad program are open and due March 8.   Any applicant must be registered as a company in Asia, 12 months old or less at time of submission since its foundation and working on web or mobile based technologies.

You can find a bunch of stories at their archive to learn what has happened at the previous event.   If you’re interested in applying for the program, please visit the application form and fill it.   Let’s be a part of the community where Asia’s greatest tech stars will be born.

See Also:

• GeeksOnAPlane At echelon 2010 In Singapore: An Overview Of South East Asia’s Web Scene (TechCrunch)
• Ten New Startups Take Off Echelon 2010′s LaunchPad (Young Upstarts)
• Singapore — a hub for technology startups? (Venture Beat)

Echelon 2011: Applications For Asia’s Leading Launchpad Program Closing In Two Weeks

Japan’s third largest social network GREE[J] announced today they would invest in Mig33 (by Project Goth, Inc.) who is a SMS and IM text messaging-based social network platform in Singapore.   GREE plans to invest several million US dollars in Mig33′s series C round and to acquire several percent stake.   This will be the first ever case investing in a non-Japanese company for GREE.   Mig33 is a social network platform designed for feature phones and has engaged 40 million users in emerging countries in Africa, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe.   The two companies are expecting to work together for developing a common platform that allows the third party providers to publish their apps and services on the both social networks.

GREE announed last month that they would take 4.2% stake in @cosme[J] (by iStyle, Inc.[J]), a word-of-mouth based marketing portal especially on cosmetics products targeting Japanese females in their 20s and 30s.

Prior to this round, Mig33 has accumulated 2.35 million US dollars fundraising from VC firms including Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM.


via: Second Times[J]

Gree To Take Several Percent Stake In Singapore’s SMS/IM-based Social Network Mig33

I was visiting Singapore in late-September for attending Accelerate 2010 and meeting with great techpreneurs.   Thanks to Bernard Leong from Chalkboard, a Singapore-based start-up providing retail promotion solutions for several smartphone platforms, and Justin Lee from Tech 65, a Singapore-based gadget-focused tech blog, we could have a readers meet-up at the country’s geek hub, Hackerspace.SG, which is located at a very convenient location near Arab Street where we can take a variety of Arabian foods at any time and hear the holy Qur’an from a mosque nearby throughout the day.

If you have any chance to visit Singapore, I strongly recommend you to visit Hackerspace.SG to meet attractive people after checking out the event calendar on their website.

Japanese techpreneur Yoski Akamatsu (@yoski), who was visiting the country for Accelerate 2010 and enjoying watching the Formula One Grand Prix night race, also joined the meet-up, and he demo-ed his service TwitCasting with a prototype of a combination of his mobile livestream service with a R/C car equipped with the iPod.

Video image captured with the on-board camera is available live on his laptop.   During his demo, a small dinner party was underway in a room next to our meet-up.   He threw the car into the room stealthily and let it crawl into the group under the dinner table.   We could what happened in that room without coming down to the room.   They were so amazingly surprised and commented that it looked like a scene of a secret agent movie.

The camera of the iPod is laid on the car and faces up to the ceiling, that’s why there’s a mirror attached to the camera pinhole to change the angle and let you see the car’s ahead.   “Without this mirror, I’ll get busted”, he says with laughing.  (If no mirror, unexpectedly it could be a molester’s tool for peeping inside someone’s skirt.)

Miss Yan Phun (@yanphun) joined the event, she is a Singapore-based techpreneur and co-founded an event management tool called FlickEvents.   Her service is still in beta test, not opened to the public and I’ve not tried it out.  But it seems like a combination of Eventbrite, Amiando and Plancast.   She’s studying on what kind of additional features attract users more than other competitive services.   If you’re interested in using the service, visit FlickEvents’ website and ask them for a beta invitation key.

Attendee Mr. Guyi Shen is the founder of Lobangclub, a Singapore-based price comparison portal and now in Beta (available with your Facebook account).   Mr. Shen says, retailers in Singapore would not like to be listed on price comparison portals as well as the other nations, neither they don’t like to expose their retail prices of merchandise on the Internet because it may cause a harder competition on discounting among them.   He’s interested in how Japan’s largest comparison portal Kakaku.com persuade Japanese retailers to be involved and why they have made such a success.   He requested me that Asiajin should have such analysis stories.   We’ll try it.   (I just answered him for the question from my point of view.)

The meet-up was an amazing experience for me.   Thank all coming by despite traffic in the city was strictly controlled due to the car race and hard to get to the venue.    Let’s keep in touch and see you soon again.

Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up in Singapore

Hello, Asiajin readers in Singapore!

I’ve just planned to attend Accelerate 2010, one of Asia’s biggest annual tech events that we also serve as a media sponsor of.   Since I’ll be in Singapore in that week, by using this opportunity, in order to exchange friendships and communicate with our readers in the country on a face-to-face basis, we expect to have a meet-up on Saturday, September 25th at 7pm at the country’s geek hub Hackerspace.SG.

(The picture of Merlion with Singapore City on the background shown above is reproduced from The Singapore Merlion is still getting strong attention after all these years… under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.)

First of all, we would like you to save the date and to RSVP via Plancast if you can join. We’ll count the number of potential attendees and prepare an agenda based on it.

In the meet-up, basically we just want to have a presentation about Japanese tech scenes and what the attendees want to hear especially from us, then there will be elevator pitch presentations by those who are managing or working with tech start-ups, followed by a networking session.  Your suggestion on the meet-up agenda is highly welcomed.  Kindly leave it as a comment for this blog post if any.   More details are expected to be announced by September 18 which is a week prior to the meet-up date.  Please re-tweet and “plancast” the event.

We really wish to thank Bernard Leong of SGEntrepreneurs / Chlkboard and Justin Lee of Hackerspace.SG for helping us to arrange this.

See you all there.

大きな地図で見る

Host: Masaru IKEDA (contributor for Asiajin, organizer for Startup Dating, web service producer, serial entrepreneur and tech journalist)
Date & Time: 7pm, Saturday, September 25, 2010 (Singapore local time)
Venue: Hackerspace.SG
70A Bussorah Street, Singapore 199483
8-min walk from Bugis MRT Station (EW12/DT14)

7pm          Door opens
7:15pm       Introduction to Asiajin and The Latest Tech Trends in Japan & Asia
8pm          Presentations by Attendees
9pm          Networking
10pm          Door closes

Beverages: Beer and soft drinks are available at Hackspace.SG.  They ask for a small token of donation for the drinks consumed to allow them to replenish their supplies.   Thank you for your cooperation.

Foods: I (Masaru) am just planning to make something delivered to take the edge off the attendees’ hunger.   “Bring your own” are also welcomed.

After the meet-up: There will be the qualifying session of the F1 Grand Prix (starting at 10pm) very near the meet-up venue.   Let’s hang out.

Note: If you’ve invented or developed something new and would like to present it in front of the attendees and Asiajin readers, please catch me at the venue or drop me a line.   The event will be streamcast live if available.   Detailed schedule are subject to change.

See Also:

• Asiajin Meeting Tokyo #1 tonight
• Report: Asiajin Meeting #1 (part one)
• Update: Asiajin To Host Readers Meet-up in Taipei This Weekend
• Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up In Taipei
• Asiajin Shanghai Meetup Held On 24th
• Report Of Asiajin Shanghai Meetup

Update: Asiajin To Host Reader Meet-up In Singapore On Saturday

Singapore-based startup PostSell has one goal: boosting sales of online retailers through product recommendations in email receipts. In other words, it’s just like Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” being built into emails that you get from shops after buying something online.

What’s interesting is that PostSell says 70% of buyers actually open those order confirmation emails, offering room for personalized product recommendations to make buyers come back.

The free upselling tool of the same name is especially geared towards smaller online shops with 50+ stock-keeping units, and the company promises it’s dead-simple to use – on any shopping cart system out there. All that retailers need to do is to send their receipts through PostSell without setups, configurations or any kind of programming.

You can sign up for a preview here, and check PostSell’s company blog for more information on how to boost sales through email.

The startup has come out of the first Founder Institute Singapore program, which started earlier this year. More info on how that came about can be found here.

PostSell Adds Personalized Product Recommendations To Email Receipts

Can you think of a great mobile or web application that’s either made in an Asian country or specifically geared towards users in this region? Or have you developed such an application yourself?

Then you should nominate and/or vote for your favorite app in the “Top 50 Apps In Asia” program that e27, a startup community from Singapore, have set up. The goal is to identify the coolest mobile and web apps in Asia and give them some serious airtime and other perks (more in the FAQ below).

The Top 50 Apps page is already pre-populated with apps from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, India, and the Philippines. But there should be room for many, many more.

The program is part of Accelerate 2010, an apparently huge technology industry event that’s going to be held in Singapore from September 22-23 (register from here/early bird info in the FAQ below). South East Asian telecom behemoth SingTel and venture fund Neoteny Labs are the other organizations behind the conference.

Here’s a quick “Top 50 Apps In Asia”-FAQ that e27 has put together:

“Top 50 Apps In Asia”: Help Accelerate 2010 Identify The Best Asia-Related Mobile And Web Apps

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon’s company which manages and sells cloud computing services like EC2, S3, CloudFront, etc., is turned out to open its Japanese subsidiary Amazon Data Services Japan at unknown time in 2009, talked by one of their two employees at Japan Amazon EC2 Users Group, a blog Publickey reported [J].

At the users group with 30 attendees, the only name-known employee, Hideki Ojima, a Japan marketing manager, who worked for Adobe Japan as a lead of developers marketing, told that they are seeking employees for several positions to expand.

He also talked that Amazon US recognizes Japanese enterprises need different approaches, that’s why the subsidiary was established.

Amazon is said to plan its second Asian data centre in the latter half of this year 2010, following to the first one in Singapore. Ojima did not answer if the second location will be Japan or not.

Amazon Opens Cloud Subsidiary In Japan