Digital Marketing in Asia Pacific

BSNL has launched a 4G service in the south Indian state of Kerala, making it the first service of this kind in India.WiMAX, with speeds of upto 37Mbps, promises to change the way the mobile is used for the internet. The introductioin of WiMAX on a large scale is slated to start on a large scale once the government auctions out the spectrum to private operators on April 9 2010.

A large scale adoption of WiMAX in India is going to only decrease the prices of the ‘smart phones’ globally.To me, all this sounds remarkably similar to how rapid internet adoption and falling internet prices kick-started the entire ecommerce industry.

Mcommerce – are you listening?

India’s online bus travel industry came of age today with www.makemytrip.com buying Ticketvala, which is one of the three prominent bus ticket providers. Other incumbents – redbus.in and travelyaari.com will be encouraged with the developments.

The online bus industry has the hard task of converting bus operators , which have traditionally been late adapters of technology, into online suppliers of inventory. They have accomplished this by building a ground up network of sales agents and a robust technology platform, letting the bus operators also share their call centre and booking platform for online bookings.

A bus traveler in India can now look forward to searching and booking a bus ticket online, selecting his seats and getting his booking ID as a text message onto his mobile phone, in a matter of minutes. Travelyaari, for example, guarantees 100% available bus inventory – so every seat on the website is available and ready to be booked.

Here’s to better value to the Indian bus traveler (and to higher valuations of course!)

India’s 450 million plus mobile subscribers got their first taste of an app store with Aircel and Airtel both launching their app stores within two weeks of each other. Airtel’s app store is neatly integrated with the mobile operator’s phone billing system – you can pay for apps you purchase on your mobile bill or through airtime minutes.

Airtel has over 1250 apps supporting various platforms in this app store. The success of the Store lies in the ease with which developers across the world can develop, publish and promote programs and applications through a single portal cutting across all platforms.

Are app development companies listening?

Toshiba has designed and is launching a Trilingual voice app for mobile phones that allows a user to translate freely between English, Japanese and Chinese. The cool thing about this app is that it is completely client-side and requires no Server-side interaction… reducing dents to your data plan. The first app is due on Window’s Mobile with iPhone and Blackberry versions to follow.

Here’s a clip of the technology…

We look forward to seeing this technology used for other languages…

As per this TechYoyo post, it looks like it’s not only Chinese or Australian censorship laws that is in the news. It’s now India’s turn, with Yahoo and Bing both censoring their search results to filter Sexually explicit content, or in some cases any reference to the word ‘sex’.

The clampdown is due to recent changes to India’s Information Technology Act of 2000, which bans the publication of pornographic material.

I wonder how long it’ll take before Google is forced to adopt similar filtering approaches for their Indian search results?

Last night, I caught a glimpse of a few Tweets that mentioned Microsoft ripping off Plurk… and decided I’d do some digging this morning.

It turns out, I didn’t have to dig too far, Plurk’s blog post kind of say’s it all. TechCrunch, NYT, WSJ and many others have also covered this news.

To put it simply, Plurk, a Canada based micro-blogging service that is very popular in Asia is claiming that Microsoft China has “ripped off” their code, UI and design, for their own MSN Juku micro-blogging service. From the looks of the images representing the UI and the code base it appears to be a blatant copyright violation on Microsoft’s part.

So far, only TechCrunch seem to be reporting a statement made by Microsoft:

“Microsoft takes intellectual property seriously, and we are currently investigating these allegations. It may take some time due to the time zone differences with Beijing.”

It’s a weak statement, and looks like Microsoft is going to have a pretty bad week with this headache. However, I don’t think this is just a standard copyright violation, politics is playing a part here…. especially as Plurk is blocked in China!!.

What do you all say?

It’s often forgotten that a big part of Asia speaks Arabic… the Middle East, is after all is ‘West Asia’ or ‘Near East’.  Arabic language came as the 8^th top language used in the web with over 50 million internet users in the Middle East.  The growing rate in Internet usage in the Middle East is a significant 1,907.9 %

I couldn’t believe when I heard the news about the release of an Adobe AIR desktop application for Arabic users.  I’ve always had problems (like with many Arabic speakers) typing Arabic on platforms/systems that weren’t meant for right-to-left languages, especially when you mix English and Arabic alphabets.  So I finally got my hands on the application and started playing around with it.

To start with, Kzalek works on Windows, Mac and Linux with full Arabic font support.  The application has a very nice and smooth interface with clear icons. It has an option to translate tweets from English to Arabic.  I was surprised by the quality of the translation; the tweets do remain meaningful when translated!   Other cool features include Bit.ly URL shortner, Twitpic for uploading images and sound notification for new tweets and direct messaging.

Kzalek is developed by @keepondev. Click here to watch  explanation of Kzalek.

This is an important step in the growing online social networking market in the Arab world.  I’m sure there will be more surprises heading our way.

Below images show the tweets in Arabic and English (click to enlarge):

We’ve written quite a lot about the Baidu and Google dichotomy in China, for instance how they’re battling it out in Mobile Search.

On this occasion the battle is a bit more mainstream with a great piece from WSJ about the different practices within China between Search heavyweights Baidu and Google. Aside from a slight digression to cover some of the localisation techniques adopted by Chinese sites such as TaoBao and TenCent IM, the article delves into the product range and local implementations of both Baidu and Google within China. The article implies quite strongly that Google is the main innovator while Baidu applies a more functional approach dedicated to the Chinese audience.

But Baidu also is an example of how many Chinese technology companies manage to outfox foreign competitors by tailoring existing technologies to China’s growing and fast-changing market. While that may not earn them respect as global innovators, their understanding of the Chinese consumer has allowed many of them to beat bigger foreign rivals at their own game in China, home to the world’s largest number of Internet users.

Definitely worth a read…

As mentioned recently, Google plans to participate in the upcoming WiMAX auctions in India. India’s WiMAX auctions are set to take place in early 2010 will earn the Indian’s government around $5.1B. Foreign companies can take part in this auction through JVs with an Indian partner and can own a maximum of 74% stake in the JV.

Google plans to participate on a 50:50 basis with MTNL, which is a state owned, publicly listed corporate providing fixed line, mobile (2G/3G), ISP and digital TV provider. What is interesting is that the government is going to auction two blocks of the BWA/WiMAX spectrum in each circle while reserving one for BSNL or MTNL (which are both state-owned). By partnering with MTNL, Google might benefit due to the circles allotted to MTNL, which will include Delhi, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Thane, which are all urban, highly developed regions.

Cebu Pacific Airlines is getting serious with the social media space and intends to make use of the social media channel to promote its low fares. It appointed Peach Interactive to promote its low fares via the social media platform in Asia (See Article). The move is a part of a bigger digital campaign, the airline is running across the region. For those interested to hear about deals from Cebu Pacific, you can follow them on Twitter.

Social Media has been the buzzword in the travel industry in recent years and many travel companies, including Cebu Pacific, now promotes their services  via this channel. What remain unclear however, for many, is the ROI on these channels. In fact many companies currently do not measure their ROI from social media. Most are still experimenting and testing waters on the effectiveness as well as finding ways to monetize this channel.

It will definitely be interesting to know how many of those who started on social media are now using social media as their main communication channel with the consumers, as well as measure the effectiveness.