One video showed a woman moving a sheet of cardboard in front of a camera. A nearby TV displayed the same cardboard with an animated, AR rabbit on it that slid back and forth and made faces based on the position of the cardboard.  Another video showed a news broadcaster carrying around a rectangular panel that displayed contextual images related to his script. There was also a brief video of an educational game for the Nintendo 3DS called Earthpedia. Morikawa explained that Qoncept’s AR software can make use of the 3DS’ dual rear-facing cameras.

Of particular note was an AR fishing game called DiaoReGaoShou (钓热高手). Players use their phone’s camera to turn real-life circular objects into virtual “ponds” that they can cast a reel into to catch fish. They can then share their digital catches with other fishermen in their vicinity. I was able to snag a few guppies from a coin placed on a table, but I didn’t get a chance to try out the social networking functionality. The game just became available in China three days ago, and can be downloaded for iOS.  In China, it is integrated with Sina Weibo.

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Here’s how it works, when signing into a website, Yinxiangma’s “ImpressionAd” was substituted for original twisted, barely-recognizable alphabets. ImpressionAd usually consisted of an image ad and accompanying texts (see example below), the image could be anything that sells, the texts could be it’s price (in this case) and so on. So instead of typing in CAPTCHA words, web users can now easily input the smartphone’s price in this case and then get access to whatever he intends to visit. In such a way CAPTCHA was turned into ads smartly and subtly.

Advertisers, publishers and users would all benefit from Yinxiangma’s solution, the advertisers grab user’s attentions, publishers get ad fee while users finally get rid of awkward verification code. Ads like this would be so much more memorable than the other displaying ones.

The company to date has applied several patents.

Also, the online advertising game changer supports target ad so advertisers get to customize user demographic, publishers, duration, supported devices and experience.

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Courtesy of Chris Tow

Founder and CEO, Roger Ying is a Stanford Graduate and grew up in South Africa. He came to China to help China develop faster and he’s picked a very challenging market with his team of 6 in Beijing.

Ying claims that social lending is a 7 Trillion + RMB/year market in China. Pandai.cn delivers next generation online financial services by providing credit loans for borrowers and high fixed income products for lenders on safe, transparent and easy-to-use online platform. Moreover Pandai.cn will be the only company in China that will allow its customers to build credit and price loans that are tailored to its customers.

The innovative feature of Pandai is their credit risk system based on working models in China, India and the USA.Price loans in according to target market segment – not a one-size fits all product.

Of course China’s biggest competitors for loans are banks and guarantee companies. However Pandai argues that banks have very stringent policies and only loan to people with money and Guarantee companies charge exorbitant interest rates. And other p2p lending have no credit risk expertise thus not protecting their lenders and borrowers suffer a poor service.

The business model is fairly straight forward too. For connecting borrowers with lenders and upon loan completion, a service fee is charged. Late repayment fees and early repayment fees will also generate revenue.

Looking at the site, there are an infinite reasons to use it. It could be borrowing money for a new laptop, to go to college, to buy a car or a house. Pandai.cn has already tested the model on a few seed users.

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Courtesy of Chris Tow

By way of face recognition, it could recognize difference faces in all your photos and then categorize them accordingly under the same person. Better yet, Smart Album innovatively integrates your photos tightly with you phone book, by tapping one photo that linked with someone in your phone book, you can either call him or message him directly.

Traditionally, smartphone photo albums were organized by different folders while with Smart Album, you can organize them by faces, namely person. Any new pictures of the same person will be included into existing album automatically, which saves you a lot of folder cleaning up job.

The product is mainly targeting Android platform with a beta release soon in next month.

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 VKU (or 微酷), taps into the trends with its mobile video sharing tool slash community that combines both mobile Internet and online video. Anyone can shoot short clips (no longer than 30 secs) easily and share them with friends through popular social media platforms like Sina Weibo and so forth.

Courtesy of Chris Tow

VKU is also a powerhouse for shooting and making short video clips. Underpinned by its strong technical team, VKU supports some unique and awesome features like realtime filtering and editing, video effects, subtitling and dubbing, all on your smartphone. Especially, with its preinstalled effects like LOMO, black and white, old times and so on, you can hands-down produce high quality professional footage with just several clicks.

You can use VKU as a LBS checkin service, only you’re checking with video rather than pictures and texts. How cool is that. Also, by leveraging on its location awareness function, VKU can categorize different videos by where you are, similar to the elastic social network concept raised by the hilarious app Color.

Founded in last September, the startup scheduled to launch its new release in next month.

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Courtesy of Chris Tow

As most are hooray for the success of HTML 5 camp, some concerned that the difficulty in producing HTML 5 animation. Usually, creating a simple Flash requires one designer plus couple hours. Now with HTML 5, it requires one designer one programmer and couple days of work. Efficiency seems to be the major problem confronting HTML animation production, regardless of its exciting features.

Mugeda, a startup with its cloud-based HTML 5 animation generator has been trying to solve the conundrum since its inception in last September. You can use it to create organic HTML5 animation contents from any browser, without any download or installation, and it’s as easy as making Flash animations. You can try it here: https://www.mugeda.com/.

The product adopts a freemium model, it remains free for normal users to get access to its basic features while charges company users for advanced options like cloud-based storage of animations, technical support, private cloud and so on.

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Courtesy of Chris Tow

The crowded Chinese mobile SNS market has been seeing so many new servcies sprang up last year, to name a few, immomo.com, qiyu.im, jimii.cn, shanju.com, zaizher.im and so on. They more or less share the similar features like location awareness, finding someone around you, free messaging etc.. All of those concepts originated from the Valley startup Yobongo, an ambient realtime communication app characterizes by location, realtime and mobile chat.

Shenbian, at the same time, differentiates itself from its peers in weibo-binding and group chatting. People who login with their Sina Weibo credential will be able to find other weibo connections (followed, followers) around them. And you can hands-down switch between private chatting and group chatting whenever you want. You can imagine its group chatting feature as a location-based Weibo-user-only chatting room. Something lacking from other mobile IM since most of them are one-on-one.

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Being the first and as of now the only company to build upon Sina Weibo’s virtual currency Sina Weibi (新浪微币), Yikuair has developed a marketplace combining social, local, mobile and commerce in an effort to help connect online/offline merchants and consumers and to offer them with special deals through a distinct micro payment system powered by Sina Weibo, the #1 Chinese twitter-like service.

The newly-founded startup is also bringing some disruptive innovations to the sluggish group buying market. Normally, daily deal sites take a cut from every deals on their site while consumers need to pay the whole sum beforehand. With Yikuair, for merchants you’re losing nothing because Yikuair takes absolutely no cut from deals and as to consumer, they only need to pay RMB 1 kuai or even free, and then pay the remaining fee upon receiving service.

Groupon roughly shares revenue with dealers on a ratio of 1:1 while in China, group buying services usually take 10% from every deal, while Yikuair takes zero from dealers, which might be a good thing for those local merchants who’re tired of having salesperson constantly knocking at their door asking for deals.

As of now Sina Weibo has more than 250 million registered users, a huge user pool that Yikuair could tap into. And besides social media like Weibo, the marketplace is also considering coming up with its own mobile app and weibo app to help merchants tout and reach out to more customers.

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Madeiracloud raised an Angel investment  last June to better organize cloud applications.

CEO Dan O’Prey and CTO Zhao Peng call themselves the Microsoft Visio of cloud computing. Their WYSIWYG web GUI enables users to simply drag and drop their cloud resources on to a canvas and connect them visually to configure the ports. Once the architecture has been designed, a template (stack) of the whole set up can be saved for reuse and launched multiply times in to live applications, without having to worry about conflicts in configuration.

Courtesy of Chris Tow

They claim that no other cloud management system has their unique GUI by taking a more holistic approach. Their stack concept is said to allow applications to be reused, shared and demonstrated in minutes rather than hours or days.

The main business case is leveraging the public cloud to take advantage of on demand resources to demo proof of concept (PoC) software to potential clients.

Madeiracloud closest competitor is a small start-up called AppCara. However they don’t see them as a big threat as they “believe that we are a lot further down the development cycle and our product has superior usability and functionality.”

The business model will work like many other SaaS. There is no initial set up fee, but a free package – limited to 2 running applications; a pro package – limited up to 10 running applications for $99/month; and an enterprise package – with pricing depending on requirements

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Although the site is still in beta and will officially launch in August this year, Founder and CEO Kenneth Chan has big hopes for G2A. Self-funded with a team of 5, Chan wants to help the little SME guy be as competitive as their larger competitors that have sophisticated supply chains and relationships to low cost Asian suppliers. You could argue that this is what Jack Ma did with Alibaba, but businesses like G2A have mixed in cooperative buying to make purchasing even cheaper. Chan says the biggest problems for international SMEs when buying from China is that they are uncomfortable with the process including language, customs, shipping, how to pay, taxes etc.

The market size is evidently big. In 2009, SME’s imported US$124 billion in goods from China alone and 80% of SME imports were from wholesalers and non-manufacturing companies. Such a big opportunity was not neglected when Japanese based Infinity Ventures and SOS Ventures, invested US$3M into OrderWithMe.com and the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing in 2011.

The process is fairly simple. SMEs can join G2A, state what they want to buy and the quantities they want. After sourcing and negotiating with suppliers they post the details on a board. Other SME buyers can join the co-operative and when there is enough, the purchase order is made. Of course everyone saves money because the total order is large.

SMEs can rate their experience with the supplier to warn or encourage others. The rating system is also designed to promote good suppliers or other SMEs and remove the bad ones. Such transparency mechanisms are aimed at keeping everyone honest and efficient. Alibaba has been infamously found to be promoting shady suppliers because they simply paid for it. G2A does not charge any fees except for a cut of the transaction value to keep the platform performance based.

To test the business model G2A will start with computer products.

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