SparkLabs, the startup accelerator that wants to inject South Korea’s startup ecosystem with Silicon Valley expertise, announced its second intake today. Its latest class is an international lineup of companies that represent a variety of sectors and are at widely different stages of funding, from bootstrapped financing to those that have closed a Series A round.

Founded in 2012, SparkLabs’ offers a three-month-long mentorship driven program. Co-founder Bernard Moon says that one of the main challenges faced by South Korea’s startup industry is the lack of role models and guidance for founders. For example, many angel investors and venture capitalists have a financial background but lack entrepreneurial experience. SparkLabs has focused on building an impressive roster of mentors, many of whom are Silicon Valley founders.

“We’re not the first accelerator or incubator in South Korea, but we are the first with a tangible outside network that is easily accessible by Korean entrepreneurs,” says Moon. “We also get applications from China, India, Taiwan, everywhere in Asia. Our dream is to be a gateway not just into Silicon Valley, but also to high-level people these founders never thought it would be possible to access.”

While SparkLabs’ first class consisted of South Korean companies hoping to break into overseas markets, the latest intake include companies from Singapore and the U.S. that view South Korea as a gateway into Asia.

“They see South Korea as more developed in terms of technology and a large early adopter base. A good foothold and feedback in South Korea helps them expand into Japan and possibly China,” says Moon.

SparkLabs is also hosting its first annual conference, NEXT, on June 14 in Seoul. The event will focus on innovation and technology, with speakers including Ray Ozzie, the founder and CEO of Talko, Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Maria G. Gotsch, president and CEO of Partnership Fund for New York City and Jonathan Levine, CIO and CTO of Rakuten Group.

SparkLabs’ inaugural cohort included educational tech startup KnowRe and WePlanet, the developers of Step Journal. Here is its second class:

StyleWiki: A Seoul-based social wiki platform for fashion enthusiasts.

iBabyBox: A Palo Alto-based online community where parents can share and sell secondhand baby products.

Megaphone: Founded in New York City, this participation TV platform’s clients include NBC, Bravo, BBC, Amex, LG, Sprint, NFL and the New York Knicks. Megaphone integrates game graphics that can be controlled by Web browsers into TV shows and allows viewers to see aggregated results of all user activity and 30-second ads in real-time.

MangoPlate: A mobile app that offers personalized restaurant recommendations in Seoul. Its search engine fine-tunes results each time a user adds a review or wish-list entry.

Zoyi: A Korean tech company that has built products including AdbyMe, Korea’s first social media advertising platform and Cooki, a news summary curation service. Zoyi is backed by Southbridge Capital, a leading Korean venture capital firm.

HeyBread: One of Korea’s leading curation commerce companies, HeyBread focuses on delivering premium organic breads from local bakeries to customers. The company plans to expand its service to the entire fresh food industry.

Petsbe: A Seoul-based premium subscription service that delivers personalized orders of pet food and monthly supplies.

Lateral: Headquartered in San Francisco, Lateral wants to redefine the fundamentals of online search by revamping outdated search methods.

DesignPlusD: A Seoul-based productivity app that includes note taking, alarm reminder and calendar functions. The company’s Remember-Block memo app was the App Store’s number one productivity apps in 12 countries and was the top paid app in South Korea during January.

TrakInvest: A Singaporean online social investment platform for equities that will be launched next month. The company, which is led Bobby Bhatia, the former managing director and head of principal investments at AIG for APAC, provides tools to identify and create future “alpha” generators. It has partnered with Thomson Reuters to provide research and analytics to its user base.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Evernote is going after KakaoTalk’s 90 million registered users by inking a partnership deal with the South Korean messaging giant that would bring Evernote integration to KakaoTalk’s mobile app.

Despite boasting nearly 4 million users here in the United States, chances are you’ve never heard of KakaoTalk. The messaging app is mostly used by Korean Americans (such as myself), to communicate with friends and family both here and abroad. Yet back in South Korea, KakaoTalk has a dominant presence. The messaging app is installed on 95 percent of the smartphones in use and has a smaller but steadily growing user base of 15 million in Japan. Mind you, in Japan KakaoTalk is still overshadowed by Line, which reached 150 million users registered users worldwide today.

Interestingly enough, the partnership is the first of its kind that Evernote has inked with any messaging app, and reveals the company’s aspirations to expand its presence across the Pacific. Out of Evernote’s global 50-million-strong user base, only 15 million of those users come from the Asia-Pacific, which includes South Korea, China, Japan and Australia. Evernote is clearly hoping to leverage KakaoTalk’s ubiquity among the South Korean population to expand its user base there.

KakaoTalk is also looking to expand its user base worldwide, and it’s hoping that Evernote’s popularity in the United States will put them in the limelight. Like I said before, KakaoTalk is a virtual unknown here in America if you’re not Korean, and the South Korean company would very much like to change that.

It’s still unclear what form Evernote will make its presence known in KakaoTalk’s app, but it’s safe to assume that the mobile app across all three platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone) will come to support the Evernote integration.

KakaoTalk is a free download at the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @baigi.

It’s an open secret that the social gaming industry is no longer the cornucopia of opportunities it used to be. Rising CPAs, falling k-factors, plateuing ARPUs and channel saturation all have made life difficult for the typical gaming studio devoid of a big network of users or a deep warchest of advertising money. But there’s a new gaming opportunity on the horizon, and the savvy tech investor will do well to take notice of it now that it’s still nascent. This opportunity is the impending mobile gaming boom in South Asia, scheduled to arrive by 2015 for all practical purposes. Read on for a thorough look at the gaming history of the region, emerging fundamentals and future expectations.

Fighting Bollywood And TV

Spurred by 200,000 gaming cafes popping up across the country, China witnessed an online gaming revolution in the early aughts. Facing no serious competition from traditional entertainment media heavily tethered by government censorship, gaming companies like Shanda and Giant Interactive firmly entrenched themselves in the typical gamer’s consciousness, making gaming a life-changing pastime in China.

By 2006, sensing the time had come for neighboring South Asia to take the plunge as well, India’s Reliance Entertainment released a gaming portal called Zapak. But unlike China, the response that Reliance received was lukewarm at best, and it turned out to be a stalled revolution. Zapak is still alive today, as are Shanda and Giant Interactive, but whereas the latter have grown to become industry leaders, Zapak never validated the business case upon which it was built.

Ultimately gaming failed to take root in India because of stiff competition from the prevalent form of entertainment in the region: Bollywood and TV. Zapak’s offerings were too underdeveloped, and subsequent interest in them was too thin to displace these highly mature regional media. Thus, other than a curious fringe, Zapak never made a dent in the South Asian universe like online gaming did across the border in China.

Analysts are mistaken to equate South Asia’s lackluster past performance with its potential as a mobile gaming hub.

Today when mobile gaming is en route to become a $48 billion industry by 2016, South Asia is excluded from the discussion almost entirely given its tepid history. But here’s the thing: Analysts are mistaken to equate South Asia’s lackluster past performance with its potential as a mobile gaming hub. Web and mobile games are two very different animals, and where the former failed to make inroads in South Asia, the latter will create some strong ripples.

Filler Entertainment

At their core, mobile games are excellent fillers for idle time when, say, waiting in a queue or for a bus. They harmoniously coexist with going to the movies or watching TV, while also retaining opportunities of exclusive engagement for hardcore users. So whereas web gaming in the region has had to compete with television and Bollywood, mobile gaming will never be in direct competition with these favorite pastimes in South Asia.

Moreover, given the region is one of the most densely populated in the world, it is reasonable to expect the average South Asian to have available more idle minutes due to greater wait times than their counterparts in the west (meaning potentially more minutes available for absorption by mobile games). And as game developers will tell you, every extra minute of engagement correlates to an uptick in ARPU.

3G And Smartphone Penetration

South Asia has been globally viewed as a slow adopter of the 3G standard. However, most people have missed the tipping point, which was reached in January: 3G penetration is now growing at a startling rate of 11 percent month over month in India, according to K. Srinivas, president of Airtel, India’s largest and the world’s third-largest mobile network operator.

Such a growth rate ensures that the current pesky 6 percent 3G penetration in India will more than triple within 12 months. That’s an estimated 210 million 3G subscribers in India by mid 2014. And you know that something has surely entered the Indian public’s imagination when Bollywood ends up making a movie about it.

Though lagging behind India, the rest of South Asia is also exhibiting healthy interest in 3G and smartphones. Taken as a whole, South Asia boasts an estimated middle class of 310 million (same as the population of the US). Owing to falling entry prices of smartphones coupled with availability of inexpensive data plans, it can be safely assumed that this 310 million strong middle class will each own a smartphone phone with affordable mobile broadband by 2015. In effect, South Asia is poised to become one of the largest smartphone markets in the world, and the implications of that on the mobile gaming industry are immense.

Carrier Billing

Because of a lack of widespread credit card usage, ARPU from digital content monetization remains quite low in South Asia. Hence conventional wisdom views the aforementioned explosive growth in smartphones as not necessarily translating to big bucks for mobile game developers. But here’s what conventional wisdom is overlooking: much like Japan and Korea (and China recently), ARPU from mobile content consumption in South Asia will be driven by carrier billing, not credit cards.

Optimistic about the role carrier billing can play in unlocking South Asia’s digital economy, local mobile network operators (MNOs) have sprung into action. For instance announcements of carrier billing rollout by MNOs in the region spotted all of 2012, and have continued well into 2013, as well. As long as MNOs deliver on these announcements and ensure judicious revenue shares for developers, expect the South Asian gaming market to become a big story around the world.

Industry Size

Total mobile phone penetration in the region currently stands at 1.1 billion subscribers, so there exists ample headroom for smartphone adoption. Expect the mobile gaming industry to be volume driven as carrier billing is rolled out and improves payer conversion rates.

Assuming the region’s 310 million-strong middle class is each armed with a smartphone by 2015 and carrier billing can help generate yearly ARPU between $1 and $3, we’re looking at an industry size between $300 million to $900 million annually, and with ample room for further growth.

Role Of Localization

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Shazam — the smartphone media discovery app that is expanding from music into TV and advert discovery with the help of chief product officer Daniel Danker poached from the BBC – today announced a partnership with Indian music service Saavn – the self-proclaimed Spotify of India – to add Shazam’s recognition engine to Saavn’s catalog of South Asian music. Although Shazam is already used by 300 million people across 200 countries, it says that the Saavn agreement is the biggest deal yet for the company in the subcontinent.

Saavn, like Spotify, offers an ad-supported digital music service with more than 1 million tracks of Bollywood, Indian and regional South Asian music in its catalogue. The company recently launched a mobile web version of its music service, targeting the vast numbers of data-enabled phones in India and South Asia that lack the ability to run smartphone apps. Last year Saavn — already available in Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu — added an English language version of the service to compete with Spotify and other Western digital music services, many of whom have yet to launch in South Asia.

“It represents the largest partnership we’ve done in this region and they will help us provide our music fans with an amazing discovery experience,” said Will Mills, Director of Music and Content for Shazam, on today’s announcement. The deal will be exclusive for a period of time, which should help Saavn in its bid to compete against other music streaming services in the region, which include Eksur and Gaana. The Indian music industry is currently growing at a rate of 60% annually, with mobile music growing 17.6% in that time, and some of that is not domestic. “The expanding Indian-American population, which has jumped by 69% over the last decade, has a median income that is nearly double the national average of $49K/year,” notes Shazam. 

Saavn itself in January said it had 10 million monthly active unique users accessing its 1-million-track library. 

That library of 1 million tracks has already been merged into Shazam’s existing database of 27 million tracks. For Shazam’s 300 million users the partnership should improve the app’s ability to identify songs from the growing Bollywood music genres, while making Shazam a more appealing proposition for Indian smartphone users.

Saavn’s CEO, Vinodh Bhat, described the partnership as an “exciting evolution in our ability to both provide an enjoyable listening experience as well as provide an enjoyable discovery experience.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s first trial to use the unused channels in the broadcast TV spectrum to provide wireless broadband access launched in 2010 in Logan, Ohio. Since then, Google has shown a lot of interest in this topic and today it is launching its second trial. This time it is in Cape Town, South Africa, where Google partnered with a number of local organizations to connect 10 schools to the new wireless broadband network. The idea behind the trial, Google says, is “to show that broadband can be offered over white spaces without interfering with licensed spectrum holders.”

To get this new network off the ground, Google partnered with the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET), CSIR Meraka, e-Schools Network, the Wireless Access Provider’s Association of South Africa and Comsol Wireless Solutions. The partners, TENET writes in its announcement today, will “periodically update ICASA, Sentech, the Joint Spectrum Advisory Group, broadcasters and other constituents on trial outcomes, including spectrum measurements and reported interference.”

Using these unused TV channels, Google argues, “has the advantage that low frequency signals can travel longer distances. The technology is well-suited to provide low cost connectivity to rural communities with poor telecommunications infrastructure, and for expanding coverage of wireless broadband in densely populated urban areas.”

The network will use a local version of Google’s spectrum database. Google launched the public trial of the U.S. version with the FCC in the U.S. earlier this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LG Electronics, which lost market share to Huawei and ZTE last year, aims to sell 40 million smartphones this year as part of its strategy to move away from basic handsets, said Park Jong Seok, the head of its mobile-communications division, before the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If the South Korean company hits its goal, this means LG’s shipments will rise 52 percent this year. LG sold 26.3 million smartphones last year and 20.2 million in 2011.

LG will rollout the Optimus G Pro in over 50 new countries in the next few months as part of its effort to compete with the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy line. The Optimus line’s importance in LG’s efforts to reshape its image as a maker of premium devices is underscored by how quickly it has been introducing new models. That Optimus G Pro’s predecessor, the Optimus G, has sold over a million units since launching in the U.S., Canada, Korea, and Japan back in November.

Kim Ki Young, an analyst at Seoul-based LIG Investment & Securities Co., told Bloomberg that LG’s strategy is similar to that of HTC, which unveiled its One model last week after its market share plummeted by more than half in 18 months, but looks more likely to succeed. “LG’s brand image in the premium league has improved. The company also seems to have higher growth potential than HTC and BlackBerry,” Kim said.

LG’s total phone sales halved in two years after its basic handset models faltered in competition with devices from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei, the Chinese company that overtook LG as a Top 5 vendor in the overall mobile phone market in Q4 2012, according to International Data Corp.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple still leads in terms of App Store revenue, according to a new report from app store analytics firm App Annie out today, but Google Play’s revenue is accelerating. From Q3 2012 to Q4 2012, Google Play revenue doubled, in a large part due to increases from Japan and South Korea, which, combined, contributed to close to half of Google Play revenue in Q4. Today, Japan leads in Google Play revenue, followed by the U.S., then South Korea.

In the fast-growing mobile industry, it seems that there are almost daily updates on the progress of iOS, Android and other platforms’ gains and losses in market share on the world’s stage. But the broad picture that’s being painted these days is that Android’s portion of global market share is soaring. In the latest report from Strategy Analytics, for example, analysts found that Android’s worldwide market share had climbed from 51 percent at the end of 2011 to 70 percent by the end of 2012.

App Annie’s report on Google Play revenue is but one example of the impact of that growth.

We’ve known that Japan and South Korea are fast growing markets for smartphone adoption – and App Annie previously reported that Japan passed the U.S. as the most lucrative market back in November. (Here’s a deeper look into Japan’s growing app economy, for more on that.) So the numbers from App Annie’s latest index are perhaps more confirmation of that ongoing trend, rather than breaking news to those watching the industry closely.

That being said, it’s still somewhat remarkable to see how well Apple’s App Store performs in terms of revenue, despite Android’s incredible land grab in smartphone market share. According to App Annie’s January 2013 index, Google Play had a higher growth rate, but the iOS App Store gained more in absolute revenue from Q3 to Q4 2012. In December, Apple earned three-and-a-half times more app revenue than Google Play.

China

The holiday season in particular helped boost Apple’s bottom line, with App Store revenue increasing by about one-fifth from Q3 to Q4. From November to December, iOS App Store revenue increased by one-third, setting records, and easily topping the year prior.

China, which Apple CEO Tim Cook recently pegged as soon to be Apple’s most important market, played an important role towards the end of 2012, moving from the 8th highest country based on revenue in the iOS App Store, to the seventh in October, and the sixth as of December. It had not yet moved into the top 5 by year-end, however, which included the U.S., U.K., Japan, Australia, and Canada. During Q3 and Q4, over 60 percent of App Store revenue came from those countries, says App Annie.

Japan & South Korea

The U.S., Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, aren’t just the top-ranking countries in terms of Google Play revenue – they’re also the top three in the percentage of app money spent on games. In December in the U.S., 76 percent of Google Play revenue came from games. In Japan, it was 88 percent. And in South Korea, it was a whopping 95 percent.

Top Publishers

Outside of the obvious – Apple and Google themselves – the top publishers in December 2012 on both iOS and Android represent the increasing globalization of the smartphone industry. Brands like South Korean NHN (makers of LINE, which just crossed 100 million users) rose up the iOS App Store charts in both stores, while Japan’s GungHo Online Entertainment (makers of the fast-growing Puzzle & Dragons) scored as Google Play’s biggest mover, jumping up 6 spots to number 5.

Overall, in December, nine of the ten top publishers by app revenue in Google Play were from Japan or South Korea, with Gameloft the only exception. Nine of the top ten games show the same trend. Meanwhile, other top publishers are those with universal appeal – EA, Disney, Rovio, and Gameloft, for example. (For more details on the various publisher rankings, you can browse the full report here.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I spent a lot of time at CES 2013 searching for new audio goodness and one of the cool things I found was IK Multimedia’s latest product called the iRig HD. Not “officially” announced yet and missing a release date, there were still a few demo units at their booth in the South Hall.

The iRig HD is an upgrade to the company’s previous and very popular iRig guitar interface for iOS mobile devices. Essentially, it allows you to plug your guitar or bass directly into your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and use software to make recordings or affect the sound of your instrument. This HD version sports some new characteristics though:

• High quality input
• Low-noise, transparent high-definition preamp
• 24 bit Analog/Digital conversion
• Preamp gain control

The iRig HD seems like the next logical step for working musicians who want to have a compact setup to record their ideas, but want to capture those ideas with the highest fidelity.

It works with all existing IK Multimedia apps (like AmpliTube) but will also work with other real-time processing apps like Garageband.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung has disclosed that Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) fined it NT$300,000 (or about US$10,389) for an advertisement that featured “misleading” information about the Samsung Galaxy Y Duos GT-S6102, reported Taiwanese news agency CNA (link via Google Translate). According to the FTC, the South Korean company said in online and catalog advertisements that the phone has automatic focus and flash functions, which it doesn’t. Samsung has deleted mention of those features from its ads.

This is not the first time that Samsung has run afoul of the FTC. In September, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology (a joint venture of the two companies) was fined, along with several other companies, for fixing the prices of optical disc drives (one of the companies was exempted from the fine for playing the role of whistleblower, but its identity was kept confidential).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s a brand new day and the sun is high.

So ready yourself for yet another eight hours of TechCrunch live streaming coverage from the CES showroom floor. Yesterday was exciting, especially visiting the massive booths of Samsung, Sony, and LG. But it’s impossible that you’re satisfied.

I’m not.

Today, we’ll be hitting up the South Hall, visiting the likes of Huawei, Parrot, Qualcomm and Verizon.

The show begins at 9am PST/12pm EST, and will run until we begin our Live Gadgets Webcast, beginning promptly at 1pm PST/4pm EST. After that, feel free to get amped up about our second round of live roaming coverage, where we’ll be visiting smaller companies that populate this rarely-visited portion of the convention.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch