China’s internet giant Tencent Holding Ltd. and Weiying Technology announced on Tuesday the establishment of a joint venture with YG Entertainment, which oversees some of the industry’s top names, including Psy, BigBang, and 2NE1. The announcement follows a recent $85 million USD injection of funding into the South Korea-based entertainment company. Weiying Technology and Tencent invested $55 million USD and $30 […]
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Analyse Asia Podcast: Mashable In Asia With Michael Kriak And Gwendolyn Regina
http://media.blubrry.com/analyseasia/content.blubrry.com/analyseasia/Episode_116__Mashable_in_Asia_with_Michael_Kriak_and_Gwendolyn_Regina.mp3 Michael Kriak and Gwendolyn Regina from Mashable joined us for a conversation on Mashable.com and its recent strategy on video and expansion into Asia. We discussed how Mashable has built a global media platform with their proprietary technology and a strong editorial team distributed across the world. Michael and Gwen also shared interesting case […]
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China’s Grindr ‘Blued’ Lands New Financing, Eyes U.S. IPO
Chinese gay flirting app Blued announced on Wednesday the completion of a Series C and C+ round led by Ventech China and Vision Knight Capital respectively. The startup said the funding size is in the hundreds of millions of RMB, without disclosing the specific amount. Founded as a virtual community for gay men in 2000, Blued has grown rapidly along with […]
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Tencent Adds Another Edutech Startup To Their Portfolio With $40M Investment
China’s cutthroat education system is a breeding ground for Chinese K-12 education startups. The country’s exam-heavy system particularly gives rise to startups that focus on helping students improve their test scores. Online education startup Yuanfudao (猿辅导), which targets China’s middle school and high school test takers, announced a $40 million USD boost from Chinese tech giant Tencent on Tuesday. Last March, the Beijing-based […]
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China Startup Pulse: The Solo Bootstrapper, Featuring The Founder of Wiredcraft
http://audio.simplecast.com/38719.mp3 Building a startup is hard enough, but going solo in China without a Chinese co-founder? That’s the story of this week’s guest speaker, Ronan Berder, the CEO and founder of Wiredcraft. In this episode, we talk about how Ronan bootstrapped his company from the ashes of a failed startup into a global DevOps company with huge […]
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This Chinese Q&A Platform Is Selling Celebrity Answers For $750 A Pop
Wang Sicong, the son of Chinese billionaire and investor Wang Jianlin, made yet another splash in Chinese media this week for grabbing over 130 thousand RMB ($19,800 USD) in three days by answering twenty-five questions, covering a wide variety of topics from investment to his sex life on a Chinese online Q&A platform. The price for each […]
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Analyse Asia Podcast: Will Apple’s Asia Focused Car Strategy Work?
http://media.blubrry.com/analyseasia/content.blubrry.com/analyseasia/Episode_114__Will_Apple_s_Asia_and_Car_strategy_work_with_Sameer_Singh.mp3 Sameer Singh from Tech-thoughts.net analyzed the recent Apple Q1 2016 earning and challenged the notion whether Apple’s Asia (India and China) and their rumored car strategy will bring them back to growth. Through the lens of the Apple’s rumored car strategy, we dove deeper into a conversation on artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles from the China to the U.S. […]
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This Startup Wants To Disrupt China’s Floral Business
FlowerPlus, a subscription flower delivery service, announced on Monday that they have raised a 70 million RMB (US$10 million) Series A round led by New Margin Ventures. Like its name suggests, FlowerPlus offers customers a no-frills flower delivery service. By following the company’s WeChat enterprise account, users can choose different flower packages through the chat interface, set a time and […]
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Chinese Delivery Companies Are Selling ‘Empty’ Packages To Boost E-Commerce Sales
As if Alibaba’s counterfeit woes weren’t enough, the Chinese tech giant’s e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall were hit with more bad news on Monday. An investigative report by The Beijing News (link in Chinese), a Chinese media company, was published yesterday, revealing China’s illegal market of “empty package scalping” (空包刷单, our translation), whereby shop owners on Taobao and Tmall […]
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China Is VERY Cranky About Microsoft’s Forced Win10 Update
Just over a year ago Windows users in China found out that they would be getting a free upgrade to Windows 10, whether the current version they were using was pirated or not. It was a bold play by Microsoft for the Chinese consumer market, but they may have undone a fair bit of that […]