China's SeedAsia Opens For Business, An Online Equity Crowdfunding Platform For Startups Across Asia
SeedAsia, an equity crowd-funding site based in China, has just launched. The company is offering stakes in selected early-stage startups to the public. “It’s kind of a hybrid between Kickstarter and private investment,” said co-founder Tom Russell. The startups to be listed would have ideally gone through some some sort of incubation program and would have shown promise. They can apply offer between $50,000 and $1.5 million in equity through SeedAsia’s platform. SeedAsia takes a 5 percent cash commission from the startup and another 5 percent of the investor’s equity. It is currently considering charging a management fee next year, said Russell. Potential investors need to apply and be screened, and SeedAsia has set the minimum investment commitment at $2,000 per member. “It costs about $20,000 to $30,000 at minimum to be an angel investor, so this lowers the entry barrier for people,” he said. SeedAsia is the first equity crowd-funding site to launch in the region, although ...
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Singapore's SingTel Wants To Pump Another $1.6B Into Startup Investments
Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, SingTel, plans to set aside $1.6 billion (S$2 billion) over the next three years for startup acquisitions. Like those it has made in recent years, these are expected to be in the digital media space. All of these can be tracked back to the major restructuring of SingTel’s business arms last year, where it divided itself into three pillars called Consumer, ICT and Digital Life. The first two focus on consumer and enterprise segments, respectively, but the Digital Life arm is most representative of the change. The division was set up as a reaction to over-the-top competition from third party content providers, and SingTel said Digital Life was going to compete head on, providing smart TV, digital magazines and local content. Some of acquisitions so far include restaurant review sites, Hungrygowhere and Eatability, and photo app Pixable. SingTel has also been bullish as a VC. In 2010, it set up a separate venture arm called Innov8 to specifically look ...
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Alibaba Group's New Stake In Sina Weibo May Help Its Nascent Smartphone OS Gain Traction Against Android & iOS
Pouring $586 million in Sina Weibo gives Alibaba Group several perks, including an inroad into social media and access to the microblogging platform’s data. Not only that, but its new 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo may also give Alibaba Group a leg-up as it seeks to promote its own smartphone operating system Alibaba Mobile OS (AMOS) as a rival to Android. As the Wall Street Journal writes, Alibaba Group’s investment in Sina Weibo means that it now has access to data generated by the platform’s 46.2 million daily users. This is on top of the 500 million registered users on Taobao, one of Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites. “If you are a big Internet company and you are ambitious enough in the mobile space, you have to do more than apps. Otherwise, you are just a small species in an ecosystem controlled by others,” Alibaba chief strategy officer Zeng Ming told WSJ. Zeng said that Alibaba Group’s target for AMOS is to power 10 percent of all smartphones shipped in China, an ambitious ...
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Canada Welcomes More China Energy Investment
Canada is open to future acquisitions by Chinese energy companies, its trade minister, as it diversifies resource exports away from the U.S. and despite controversy over Cnooc's recent acquisition of Canada's Nexen.
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500 Startups Grad Waygo Releases New Version With More Chinese Translation Functions, Seeks Android Developer
Optical character reader (OCR) translation app Waygo, which was part of the 500 Startups accelerator batch that graduated in February, just launched a new version with more functions and social-sharing options. The handy app, which I reviewed back in January, is also currently in the process of closing its first round of investment. The new version of Waygo boosts more translation capabilities and allows users to share translations with their friends through email, Twitter and Facebook. The developers hope that this will not only increase Waygo’s profile but also help them fine tune the app’s translation algorithms (its OCR was built from scratch in-house). “We hope that our users will share both interesting translations as well as wrong translations so we can improve Waygo,” the team says. The previous version of Waygo only supported single line translations; this version can read several lines of Chinese characters at once. In addition to food menus, Waygo 2.0 can now translate ...
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