Group items tagged

stats from asia, interesting to keep in mind

It is attributed to more smartphone growth in the Asia Pacific market.

"Line, a Japan-made WhatsApp rival that is owned by Korean content giant Naver, just announced that it has hit 10 million registered users in Thailand at a press conference in Bangkok today, marking the first time it has provided a figure for a market outside of its native Japan. The company has more than 75 million users worldwide, so a pretty significant chunk of its user base is in Thailand, but more impressive than that is the fact that Facebook itself has 17.9 million users in Thailand (it is Facebook's 17th largest market)."

Payment App that requires no credit card or bank account

"News and magazine apps are a segment where the momentum is likely to shift towards the Web within the next two to three years," noted senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. "Since news and media content already account for a large share of smartphone usage and are likely to play an even bigger role in later adopters' usage, changes in this segment alone will make subscribers on average download fewer native apps." The next wave of smartphone owners in mature markets like the U.S., Western Europe and Asia will download fewer apps than the first one-third of mobile consumers who bought smartphones, according to the report on mobile app storefronts. At the same time, ABI expects that in the games and utilities categories, the mobile Web will probably never catch up with native apps, due to the difficulty in matching the user experience. ABI's outlook on the future of apps appears at odds with a separate report released Tuesday by Strategy Analytics, which maintains that the emergence of HTML5 won't put much of a dent in the app economy. Instead, it predicts the Web programming language will lead to the spread of hybrid apps that combine HTML5 with native APIs (application programming interface) to harness the best of native and open standards.

Goal: The Wild Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the wilderness, started the Forever Wild Rhino Protection initiative to save Rhinos from extinction due to hunting in Asia.  Problem: Like all non-profits they had no money to create awareness and get support.  Insight: People don't always pay attention to these types of serious causes, but they sure seem to have a lot of time to watch silly viral videos on the internet.  Strategy: Find a way to have the message integrated into these silly viral videos... for free.  Solution: Download the top trending viral videos from YouTube, edit part of the video to include messaging about their initiative, re-upload the video with the same exact title as the original and call it YouTube Interventions. 

Tencent Holdings is China's biggest internet company, with 430 million users.  China's online advertising market expanded more than 40% to $4.2 billion last year, according to Media Partners Asia. The industry may exceed $10 billion by 2015, it said. Tencent CEO Ma Huateng is wooing that money by shifting his focus from personal computers to mobile devices.

Expansion of Purikura culture to mobile with a social network baked in. It's like Instagram for Japanese teenage girls.

Reverse Frictionless Economy?