What's Fueling Growth In The Fragmented World Of Messaging Apps? Immigrants.
Even though it might seem intuitive that one messaging app will rule them all, WeChat, Line, WhatsApp and others are proving that messaging remains a stubbornly fragmented category with many geographic regions of the world seeing different leaders. KakaoTalk rules in South Korea, while WeChat dominates in China, while Line rules in Japan and the U.S. has no overwhelming leader. One thing that’s interesting to note is how these apps are growing outside of their home markets. They are, in fact, spreading through immigrants, according to app tracking company Onavo. So immigrants aren’t just bringing their languages and cultures to new countries; they’re bringing apps too. The company is basing its thesis on correlations between usage of different apps in the U.S. market. Onavo has a couple data compression and management apps that several million people use to manage their data. Because they track data flowing in and out of every app, they have a gauge on which apps are actively being ...
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More Exits For Asian E-commerce Firms, But Valuations Still Small
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 while India had the most exit deals done so far, China completely dominated in terms of investment volume. India had 154 exits since 2010, and China had 83. Russia had 61, Singapore 35 and Japan 11, in the time. But those 83 exits in China were worth $4.8 billion collectively. India trails at $978 million in second place. Russia had $731 million, followed by Singapore at $328 million and Japan at just $58 million. China’s activity saw a particularly big spike in Q2 of 2011, thanks to three mega-deals there: 360buy ($1.5 billion), 55tuan ($200 million) and Lashou ($110 million). Besides exits, ...
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Japan's Abe ends Myanmar visit with aid, debt write-off
YANGON - Japan on Sunday endorsed Myanmar's reform program by writing off nearly $2 billion in debt and extending new aid, some of which will help support an industrial zone being developed by Japanese firms near the commercial capital, Yangon.
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Reuters
Made For The World. Built And Designed In China.
For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’ It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience. But that’s a stereotype that isn’t exactly true anymore. A small group of companies — both small, bootstrapped app startups and multi-billion dollar giants like Tencent — are showing that they can design apps or higher-end hardware with international appeal. Tencent, one of the country’s gargantuan Internet powers with a market cap of $72 billion dollars, often likes to point out the international reach of its messaging app Weixin or WeChat. That app has blossomed to more than 190 million monthly active users over the past year and with about 40 million of registered users outside of China. “I’m very glad to see the internationalization of Tencent,” ...
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Japan Pledges $2 Billion for African Projects
Japan is pledging $2 billion for energy and mineral projects in Africa, capping a conference with government resource officials from across the continent.
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