Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer.

Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list.

Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content.

Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump.

While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere.

Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard.

Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users.

The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company.

While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education.

Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market.

For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system.

Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example.

With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education.

Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.”

And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something…

Google Developer page here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Singaporean price comparison startup Save 22 just got an investment of “mid six figures” in Singapore dollars, according to co-founder, Guyi Shen. S$500,000 translates to about US$400,000, as a reference.

The three-year-old startup indexes prices of goods and displays a price comparison. Its mobile app also allows you to scan a barcode of a product with your phone, and it will display a list of stores that list the same item, organized by price.

Its database covers about 500,000 products, and the listings come from both retailers and mobile app users who submit product and pricing data. The company says it has staff on the ground actively indexing prices of popular goods, as well.

The funding round was led by Crystal Horse Investments, an angel firm in Singapore. Crystal Horse also invested in Singapore-based Dropmyemail and Hong Kong-based Frenzoo.

Other participants in the round are Nuffnang from Malaysia, which operates the largest blog advertising network in Southeast Asia, Strategia Adventures and Little Lights Capital, from Indonesia.

Chun Dong Chau, an investor with Crystal Horse, said the company was picked because of its engineering team. He claims that Save 22′s data engine on the backend mines data collected from retail partners’ catalogs. Compared with other price comparison websites, which just provide lead generation back to retailers, Save 22 is expected to develop an additional revenue stream from offering some data analytics back to third parties.

The investor is pushing Save 22 to continue growing its database within the region, which will improve the quality of its analysis, he said. “Southeast Asia is going in terms of its GDP but also Internet and mobile penetration is growing massively. The market is quite big, and we don’t have plans to go outside yet.”

The company competes with other players Asia like PricePinz. The latter has a pretty similar app that also does barcode scanning, but is a younger firm, and just launched its app at the start of this year. At the start of the year, PricePinz said it had just about 4,000 products cataloged. It also said in an interview with e27 that its focus is restricted to electronic goods for now, but plans to expand to other verticals like groceries and apparel within the year.

If it’s a scramble to catalog more data, Save 22 is the winner for now in the region, but expansion plans will potentially open it up to competition with global giants like ShopSavvy. On the e-commerce front, Amazon’s PriceCheck and eBay’s Redlaser are other barcode scanning apps, and have the backing of large firms with huge product databases.

Save 22 was founded by Shen and Ronald Cheung, in March 2010, and has nine employees, including its two founders. It was renamed from Lobangclub (‘lobang’ translates to ‘deal’ in the Malay language) last year.

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The food delivery wars continue to heat up: today foodpanda, the Rocket Internet-incubated startup that offers a one-stop service to order food from a selection of restaurants and take-out joints to be brought to your door and now working with some 15,000 restaurants globally, is today announcing that it has picked up $20 million in funding, with participation from Rocket regular AB Kinnevik, Russia’s Phenomen Ventures as well as Rocket Internet themselves. This is not only foodpanda’s first reported round of investment, but it also looks like it might be Phenomen’s first public investment in a Rocket Internet company; the VCs have previously backed other e-commerce ventures like Fab, Hailo and OneTwoTrip, as well as the YC-incubated video company Virool.

Foodpanda’s funding follows a number of other big rounds for other Europe-based startups offering similar services. They include $50 million for Delivery Hero and $64 million for Just-Eat. The funding race is a sign of how, in this market of a lot of me-too players, getting critical mass and a technological edge over competitors will be key to longer-term survival and profit.

Rocket Internet, founded by the Samwer brothers, has emerged over the years as one of Europe’s bigger e-commerce incubators, with notable exits to companies like eBay and Groupon. But more recently the Samwers have been setting their sites on emerging markets and tapping the opportunities there. In that regard, foodpanda is no exception. Including its sub-brand hellofood, the company is now active in 27 markets — in fact, only emerging markets, with a focus in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. The total list is India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, Nigeria, Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Hungary, Venezuela, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Saudi Arabia.

Ralf Wenzel, the global MD, says that this funding will not only be used to expand to more countries, but also to build out the operations into more cities in those where it’s already active. “We do cover certain cities already but one of the things is to expand into new ones. For example, in Russia we have very good coverage in three cities but now we’d like to move to 17 more,” he said in an interview, adding that extra countries are also on the agenda. “We are launching in more Eastern European and Asian counties. We still see a lot of markets that will be very interesting for us.” Foodpanda claims that it is now the “market leader” in many of the countries in which it operates.

On the subject of technology investments, one of Rocket Internet’s interesting selling points is how its companies can potentially leverage some of the other assets in the portfolio to help their own growth. Wenzel notes that in the case of foodpanda this might play out in areas like customer service and logistics — using some of the same teams and backend systems that are being rolled out for other e-commerce operations in areas like fashion and other merchandize. Another might be in how payments are taken for food. Working in emerging markets, payment card penetration is not especially high, so foodpanda is trying to come up with alternative ways of helping people pay for their food that are potentially more secure than simply taking cash on delivery.

“Payment acceptance is an important topic for us, how customers pay for the food that is delivered to them,” he said. “We want to find ways of collecting payments from restaurants without too much overhead, and we also want to provide the best user expeirence for that. We have started to introduce online payments, which is also an area where we will use investment. We also have good synergies with Payleven [Rocket's Square competitor]. Although there is nothing decided yet, there is definitely a lot of potential. Fortuntately we are seeing the growth of the availability of payment options.”

While foodpanda is not transparent on its commission structure — it varies city-by-city and depends on whether the deal is with a chain or independent, Wenzel says — he does note that there are some emerging popular categories. In Russia, most order sushi, he says; while in African countries the most popular cuisine is Mexican and in Latin America it’s Indian food.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Though Southeast Asia is one of the world’s fastest growing economies and benefits from a youthful, tech-savvy population, the region’s startup ecosystem is still in its infancy and many founders lack resources. The freshly launched BootstrapAccelerator Asia seeks to address that gap. Founded by San Francisco-based seed and venture capital fund BootstrapLabs and Malaysia’s MAD Incubator, BootstrapAccelerator Asia is currently seeking startups that have the potential for global expansion.

The year-long program will focus on “early-stage capital efficient startups that leverage the speed of Internet distribution and the scalability of cloud infrastructure,” bringing promising candidates to Silicon Valley.

Foreign startups that BootstrapLabs has previously relocated to Silicon Valley include Prezi, Witsbits, AudioDraft and Zerply, which have raised a combined $25 million in funding. MAD (Make A Difference) Incubator is the largest private incubator in Malaysia, with the goal of helping 1,000 startups achieve a $1 million turnover by 2015. BootstrapAccelerator Asia is supported by Malaysia’s Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the government group that directs and oversees the country’s National Information and Communication Technology Initiative.

BootstrapAccelerator Asia’s startups will receive cash and other benefits valued at over $35,000. Instead of organizing startups into cohorts, the accelerator will evaluate candidates on a monthly basis and enroll new participants at the relative stage of their development.

Though BootstrapAccelerator Asia will draw its startups from across sectors, Benjamin Levy, a partner at BoostrapLabs, says the firm has seen “a surge in mobile, Internet Web services, software as a service and gaming products” in the region.

“We are equally excited in seeing innovations from the Internet of Things, big data and B2C that leverages on the Internet/mobile and cloud infrastructure, bringing tremendous amounts of scalability and market reach towards regional and global markets in Southeast Asia,” Levy adds.

As BootstrapAccelerator Asia’s mentors work with startup teams, they will keep an eye out for companies that have the potential to reach a worldwide market. But Levy says there are plenty of exciting growth opportunities in Southeast Asia.

The region’s startup ecosystem may still be in its infancy, but founders benefit from the close proximity of its countries, which reduces the cost of doing business across different markets. As the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economy becomes more integrated with the ASEAN Economic Community, entrepreneurs will also enjoy the advantages of greater trade liberalization and open economies, Levy says.

“Being accepted in this accelerator means that in our view they are good potentials for the SE Asian market, markets such as Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam,” he says. “Our goal over time is to build our network platform in these countries so that it will be easy leverage for our accelerator startups.”

Startups can apply here. The application deadline is May 30 and the first enrollment begins on July 2.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zalora, Rocket Internet‘s pan-Asian fashion retail site, has launched an iOS app, as it seeks to capture the growing base of consumers in Asia who are using smartphones as their primary, and sometimes only, way of getting online.

The Zalora app was quietly released to the Apple App Store on the 17th of April before the wider announcement today, and was built by the company’s Singapore operations. It said last month it started building a regional software development center here to work on its Web platform and mobile apps, so it’s likely we’ll see more apps coming out for the store.

The iOS app allows you to browse and buy items on the store organized by brand or category, and rate favorites as well. Zalora says the app’s catalog is pulled from the store’s various collections across its inventory for different countries, so it sounds like you might be able to view more items in the app than on its country-specific sites.

Zalora is Singapore-based, and is barely a year old. It’s gone through an aggressive expansion in the region, and is in now eight markets in Asia: Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines. It’s most recent round of funding was $26 million in March led by German retail conglomerate Tengelmann, just six months after an undisclosed, double-digit million sum from JP Morgan.

Given its focus on Asia, it’s curious that Zalora decided to debut on the iPhone instead of Android phones, which are more popular in the region. According to a consumer study done in Southeast Asia by Ericsson, by the third quarter last year 31 percent of phones here were Android-based. The iPhone had about 19 percent of the overall handset market.

One country does buck that trend, however. Zalora’s headquarters of Singapore has a 46 percent adoption of iOS, and just 29 percent for Android. Singapore has a smartphone penetration of around 90 to 92 percent, depending on who you ask, so those numbers are generally higher than neighboring countries.

Zalora has also been diverting some resources to the mobile interface. This is its first native app, but it launched a mobile site in January.

We’ve reached out to Zalora for more details on its mobile strategy, and will update as we hear from it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apps Foundry just announced that it has raised $2.42 million (S$3 million) in a Series B round of funding. The Indonesian company is registered and headquartered in Singapore, and this round of funding has come from Indonesia’s largest media group, Kompas Gramedia.

The company’s main product is a digital newsstand app called Scoop. This round of funding will go towards Apps Foundry’s expansion plans to the rest of the neighboring Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, said CEO, Willson Cuaca.

Kompas Gramedia owns a number of different publishing platforms covering print media, radio, TV and online sites in Indonesia. To be precise, its PR states that it has 26 newspapers, 80 magazines, seven book publishers, 23 radio stations, 103 bookstores, and nine TV stations. And 50 hotels. Phew.

One of its newspapers, Kompas Daily, has one of the largest circulations in the country, and prior to this funding round, Scoop had an exclusive arrangement with the newspaper. Kompas’ digital group director, Edi Taslim, said the app was attractive to the publisher because it’s already managed to get 90 percent of the country’s magazine publishers and 50 daily papers onboard. He added that 10,000 e-books from Kompas Gramedia’s seven publishers can be found on Scoop, and that the investment in the app maker was a strategic decision for the media giant in order for it to “stay on top of current trends” while minimizing the risk of undertaking the building of a similar app itself.

Newsstand apps are attractive to publishers because they allow them to get content to readers without having to strike individual content deals with device makers themselves.

Last year, a France-based digital newsstand app called Lekiosk raised $7.1 million in a Series B round. The app is touted as “Spotify for magazines”, and last month the company announced a deal with Asus to have the Lekiosk preloaded on its Android gadgets.

Cuaca told TechCrunch that this funding round for Apps Foundry will bring the company’s total funding to $3.4 million (S$4.3 million) since its launch in 2010. Its angel and seed round at the beginning came up to $257,939 (S$320,000), and was led by Indonesian accelerator, East Ventures.

Its Series A was closed in December 2011, where it attracted $810,000 (S$1 million) primarily for Scoop from Shanghai-based VC Gobi Partners, and Japanese investment firm Mitsui Global Investment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Music streaming service, Spotify, has come to the three Asian cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Its premium service, priced at $9.90 per month in the US, will also be a little cheaper in the region, with Malaysians getting the lowest price.

In Singapore, the service is priced monthly at $7.99 (S$9.90), in Hong Kong it’s $6.18 (48 HKD) and in Malaysia it will be $4.90 (14.9 MYR). It’s practically the new Big Mac Index of music subscribers, going by Spotify’s head of new markets, Sriram Krishnan. He told us the prices are a “sweet spot” based on deep studies of each market.

Spotify does come for free, but it premium users will be able to use its mobile apps, and get functions like offline caching, where songs are stored in devices and can be played without an Internet connection. Premium users also listen at 320 kbps, while free accounts stream at 160 kbps.

Krishnan said Spotify has 24 million “active” users (he couldn’t define what “active” means in Spotify terms), and 6 million of those are paying. In comparison, fellow US music streaming site, Pandora, said recently that it has a base of about 200 million users, of which 70 million log in each month.

Spotify’s arrival in Asia marks one of the first times a paid streaming service has come to the region. Others such as Netflix and Pandora are missing. Users outside of the US used to be able to access Pandora by registering with a US postal code, but the service had to comply with DMCA regulations, and finally closed its doors to non-US users in 2007 through IP filtering.

Krishnan would not give specifics on the deals made in Asia, but said that Spotify’s size makes it more of a force to reckon with during negotiations with industry execs. “We’ve been around for five years. In the past four years, we gave back $500 million to the music industry. This year, we will give back another $500 million. Having reached this scale, we’re now taken seriously,” he said.

Media providers have been nervous coming into Asia because of piracy concerns. He acknowledged that piracy continues to be an issue here, but said that a premium service’s ability to offer a more convenient way to get content without going through the hassle of BitTorrenting a file would trump piracy.

Of course BitTorrent is free, and you could theoretically capture a streamed track in all its 320 kbps glory, but he said that free accounts would address that sort of behavior, and the premium accounts are there for people more serious about their music.

“Now that we’re in town, people have a way to access free legal music. We’re confident that our presence will revitalize the industry,” he said.

Besides piracy issues, a potential expansion to new markets with the risk that few may sign up for a subscription can be costly for middlemen services like Spotify, amid rising content prices from rights owners. In February, Pandora indicated that it paid $65.7 million for its content in the third quarter last year, and that per-track royalty rates have shot up more than 25 percent over the past three years. It also said it expects rates to increase by another 16 percent by 2015.

Spotify has a Hong Kong office, where Krishnan is based, and it is currently hiring sales and consumer marketing execs in its brand new Singapore office.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the recent months, two new jobs sites in Asia have popped up with interesting new takes on the process of pairing jobseekers with potential employers. The stark difference between them and the likes of JobStreet and Monster highlight how much room there is for innovation in the traditional jobs classifieds scene.

I’ve always found that cold calls tend to come from the most mismatched employers, and trawling through job listings on classified listings seems to throw up dismal harvests. LinkedIn caught onto this potential a couple of years ago, when the company went public and started a recruiting service. The recruitment business is now the largest contributing pillar to its revenues, which in the third quarter last year hit $252 million—up 81 percent from the corresponding quarter a year prior.

As a comparison, Monster’s revenues were $250 million in its second quarter last year, but are flattening out at 2 percent growth.

In Japan, Swimmy Minami founded a jobs site called BizReach.jp in 2009. Earlier this year, he launched a separate entity for the Asia-Pacific (focusing on Hong Kong and Singapore) called RegionUp. The difference between Minami’s sites and other classifieds is that jobseekers pay a subscription to be listed on these sites, and you also have to be qualified for a job that will make you US$100,000 and up per annum.

Minami said that this helps keep the listings to higher-paying management roles, so users don’t waste their time on jobs they don’t want. The company also screens each user to make sure they are qualified for the pay bracket. This helps BizReach and RegionUp approach employers (which don’t pay to interact with the sites) with a portfolio of candidates that are more likely to get the jobs, he said.

All of this started because Minami was looking for a job himself back in 2008. Up to this point, he had worked at Morgan Stanley and for Hong Kong magnate, Lee Ka Shing. He co-founded and ran a baseball team, The Rakuten Eagles, under the Rakuten firm, and he was getting restless.

“I talked to 27 recruiters in one month, and they all showed me different positions in different companies. I felt that if I could pay someone to gather information on jobs for me, I’d do that rather than spend 40 hours meeting 27 recruiters,” he said.

There aren’t many other subscription-based job sites yet. TheLadders.com is one, but doesn’t seem to have a salary floor for users to meet. Minami’s Japanese operations with BizReach employs 160 people, and the new Singapore headquarters has six. Minami splits his time between Japan and Singapore now to grow the new operations.

He said the site attracts about 140,000 jobseekers and about 1,600 recruiters daily. In February 2010, it got $2.6 million in funding from Japanese VC, Jafco.

Taking word-of-mouth recommendations further
Another site that just launched, Tribehired is tapping users’ social networks to make more meaningful job connections. The company is based in Malaysia, and recently started global expansion plans, thanks to a $560,000 round of funding from Singapore’s TNF Ventures and a couple of angel investors.

The site graduated from Singaporean accelerator, JFDI Asia‘s bootcamp program. The idea is that users hook up their Facebook networks to the site, and uses friends to recommend jobs to them. Its operations manager, Illum Khan, said the company started in May 2012, and is now using the funding to hire sales people and UI developers in Singapore.

The beta site is being tested across a few thousand users in Malaysia, and Tribehired plans to launch proper in about two months.

Tribehired received some funding from Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd, a government agency under the Ministry of Finance, Malaysia.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BlackBerry delivered one of the world’s most mysterious press releases a short time ago when it revealed that it had sold a cool 1 million BB10 devices to an unnamed partner, but now it looks like some sleuthing has turned up the real client. AllThingsD and Detwiler Fenton both report that the likely source of the order was Brightstar, an international distribution company that counts Verizon, along with carriers around the world as its partners.

Brightstar is an established BlackBerry customer, and distributes handsets from the Waterloo manufacturer in some of its strongest markets, including in countries like Malaysia where BlackBerry retains very high popularity. Brightstar’s order (if indeed this is the client in question) would indeed be the largest ever single order of BlackBerry devices, but it’s also potentially a way for companies like Verizon to make a sizable bet on the company’s brand new OS and hardware, without taking on all the risk for such an order itself.

Detwiler Fenton says that the move indicates “Verizon doesn’t believe this well be a strong seller since it normally tries to allocate hot product on its own,” and that using Brightstar means it will spread out some of the responsibility and potential reward that comes with placing inventory in big-box retail locations like Best Buy, in exchange for the security of not being left solely on the hook should things go south. The U.S. launch of BlackBerry 10 happened last Friday, and while not all the cards are on the table, there’s still some early reason to believe things didn’t go amazingly well.

BlackBerry has its earnings coming up this week on Thursday, but sales of BB10 devices in the U.S. won’t be included in or influence the results. Still, stock price is down today after last weekend’s launch failed to garner the kind of high-profile success and buzz associated with new hardware from Apple or Samsung.

That million is still a big number, and a sizable order. But if Detwiler Fenton is accurate in its report and this involved carriers like Verizon placing an order through their distribution partner, it’s a lot less significant than were it to go to a single buyer. We’ve contacted RIM for comment, but they did not respond by time of publication.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Catcha Group, a Malaysia-based investment firm has announced it will invest up to $150 million in Asean-based online businesses over the next five years. The funds will come both from the top as well as through the Catcha Group’s subsidiaries.

The Asean region refers to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

The company’s online assets are worth over $300 million together, according to reports. Catcha’s CEO, Patrick Grove, said the decision to carve out the funding is because the company is seeing a rise in ideas and entrepreneurs in the region, and is keen to make successful exists from these investments.

One of Catcha’s crowning investments was its $300,000 investment into the iProperty portal in 2007, which today is worth $170 million.

Catcha has its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. Its digital and print publishing arm, Catcha Media, is listed on the Malaysian stock exchange’s junior board. The company’s iProperty and iCarAsia site are both listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

(via e27)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch