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This Week in Asia Episode 55: The Story behind Yahoo-Koprol

Posted by admin on Jun 28, 2010 in This Week in Asia | View Comments

The acquisition of Koprol by Yahoo is probably the most important tech event which rocked Southeast Asia this year. With the founders of Koprol, Fajar Budiprasetyo & Daniel Armanto together with our dear Smithy from Yahoo, we discussed the origins of Koprol (and how it was launched before FourSquare). We also found out how the founders built the mobile social network from zero to 100K users and the interesting features of Koprol before the fateful acquisition. In fact, we get an insider view behind the scenes on the day when the acquisition was announced. Finally, we hear how the founders and Smithy explain how the marriage between Yahoo & Koprol from their own perspectives and the future which lies ahead for Koprol.

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This Week in Asia Episode 54: All over CommunicAsia, Nokia & InMobi

Posted by admin on Jun 21, 2010 in This Week in Asia | View Comments

The TWIA crew in our virtual studio, sets off this week on two major events: CommunicAsia 2010 & Nokia Connection. With a flurry of talking points on the future direction of Nokia and how the mobile landscape is shaping up in Philippines similar to the Indonesian one, the crew also looked at how InMobi, the Indian mobile ad network is moving into the US and the usual Chinese sightings: TenCent to acquire Comsenz? and FourSquare is now banned in China.

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This Week in Asia Episode 53: Wesley Chun from Google

Posted by admin on Jun 17, 2010 in This Week in Asia | View Comments

Recently, Singapore held the first APAC PyCon event, and one of the keynote speakers is Wesley Chun (@wescpy), who’s the author of Prentice Hall’s bestseller “Core Python Programming”. We sat down with Wesley in Google Singapore HQ and discuss on how he started writing Python programming books to help developers to learn the art, the new developments from Python 2 to 3 and his role in Google.

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This Week in Asia Episode 52: Asia coming of Age?

Posted by admin on Jun 10, 2010 in This Week in Asia | View Comments

Back to the studio after an exciting week from Echelon 2010 and the good news that we are recently mentioned on TechCrunch. Akky Akimoto, the founder of Asiajin.com is here with us this week as our special guest. The week could not have been better without Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4 and another massive showdown between Apple & Google/Admob in mobile advertising. How do those events affect Asia? While Gree, Japan’s number 2 mobile social network is now casting its attention to US and China markets, how about Zynga who is turning their guns to India and China? If you think Google TV is really new, why not find out what has been happening between web and TV in Asia here, and finally, the Geeks on the Plane have declared Silicon Valley is just a state of mind & dying, is Asia really coming of age?

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This Week in Asia Episode 51: Varsha Rao from SingTel Digital Media

Posted by admin on Jun 9, 2010 in This Week in Asia | View Comments

As Steve Jobs always say in his keynote, “there’s just one more thing ….” Over here in TWIA, we have managed to obtain one more special interview during Echelon 2010 (before our 50th episode). Varsha Rao, CEO, SingTel Digital Media (which manages inSing.com) discussed her thoughts on her work in inSing.com, social media marketing & the focus on localized content to engage consumers. She also shared her thoughts on Echelon 2010 conference and the case presentation on Indonesia during Echelon 2010.

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This Week in Asia Episode 50: Live from Echelon 2010

Posted by admin on Jun 3, 2010 in This Week in Asia | View Comments

Coming live from Echelon 2010 on 2 June with the largest panel ever assembled and a major announcement, the TWIA crew is in full force for the 1st time with interesting threads of discussion ever pursued. With the major announcement for TWIA that DailySocial.net (Indonesia) and Mobinode.com (China) will syndicate our show in the future, we hope to extend our show to reach further shores that provide Asia with the analysis on news which rocked the web, mobile and tech space. In our distinguished panel, we have Dave McClure (@davemcclure), Serkan Toto (@serkantoto) from TechCrunch, Mohan Belani from E27 (@mohanbelani), Gen Kanai from Mozilla Corporation (@genkanai), Rama Mamuaya from DailySocial.net (@rampok) and the full team with Chew Lin Kay (@chewlink) and Michael Smith (@dreampipe). We start with a review of Echelon 2010 with discussion on social gaming, the shift from web to mobile browser in Asia, the start-ups launch with Foound leading the way and Dave’s thoughts on how they can improve for the future. Following on, we crisscrossed through a variety of issues crossing from country to country (China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and etc.), the travel stories from Geeks on a Plane (GOAP) and take interesting questions from our audience. Finally, we wrapped up with what all our panelists wish for Echelon 2011.