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Uber scores a point in India by sorting out credit card payments
From today, Uber riders in India will again have the option to pay by credit card. This had been suspended last year following complaints by local taxi services to the Reserve Bank of India. They had...
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Why this food startup wants to know your mood
The bevy of food startups rising up in India makes differentiation more imperative than ever. One of the ways a nine-month-old startup has started to do so is with a new form of categorization based...
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Forget Internet.org, this startup has a net neutral way to make surfing cheaper
My mum is a prepaid smartphone user. A year ago, I introduced her to the joys of instant messaging on WhatsApp, reading Tech in Asia on her little device, and Skyping. That’s just about all she does...
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Hike’s direct reply to WhatsApp: ‘We don’t need no internet’
One of the keys to succeeding in India is to understand the realities on the ground, and one of these is poor internet connectivity in large parts of the country. Despite the rise in smartphone usage,...
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Chinese tech firms flexed their global muscle in 2015. Here’s what they did.
Chinese companies expanded globally in 2015. Photo credit: Whatsername? As we approach a new year in 2016, let’s take a quick look back at how Chinese tech companies spent their time outside their...
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Uber’s Travis Kalanick is trying out a new strategy to win in India
Taxi-hailing apps are split into two camps: Uber vs the rest. In December, rivals Ola in India, Didi Kuaidi in China, GrabTaxi in Southeast Asia, and Lyft in the US announced a strategic global...
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‘Everybody hates overheating phones’, and other insights from Baidu’s latest...
Baidu’s been sharing a lot of interesting data of late, courtesy of their Android app store MoboMarket. Last year, they published a report on how Indonesians consume apps. This time, they’ve published...
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How a Valentine’s Day catastrophe turned into a business idea
Photo credit: Beck Gusler It’s Valentine’s Day. Your ‘special someone’ has made it quite clear they’re expecting flowers. So you do the decent thing and pony up for a lovely bouquet to be delivered to...
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Get your employees off their butts with FeetApart
Photo credit: Pixabay If you spend the major chunk of your day hunching over your computer, and your midriff’s a casualty of your lifestyle, it is time to make some changes. You’ve tried it all you...
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Got your seed funding? Here’s the straight talk on what to do next
Photo credit: YouTube You’ve developed your product and found a market for it. You’ve even found some seed funding, and are raring to take on the world. But then you realize you may have walked through...
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Cubeit lets you use 30 apps at once. Accel, Helion are helping.
Photo credit: Cubeit. Thirty two. That’s the maximum number of apps the average user in India stores in her smartphone. And it’s still lower than the world average of forty two. Most smartphone users...
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This Fulbright scholar from Harvard built an app so new mothers could keep...
Photo credit: Vera Kratochvil The Great Indian Joint Family, as shown by Bollywood, has been found only on silver screens for long time now. At last count, there were about 172 million nuclear families...
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Make poetry with a perfect stranger – with this haiku app
Photo credit: Pixabay. It’s that heady season of blossoms in India and a line of poetry springs out of your fingers. What happens next is sheer magic. A woman in China picks up the thread and taps a...
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IIT grad’s app gets Unitus funding to do your laundry
Photo credit: Pixabay. There’s a lot you want to do this weekend. Party hard, go for a movie, take the kids for activity classes, may be even a short, outdoor trip. But wait, who is going to do the...
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Here’s why BigBasket is killing it in India while the others struggle
Photo credit: publicdomainpictures.netThis week, online grocery delivery platform BigBasket raised a fresh round of funding worth US$150 million led by UAE-based Abraaj Group, even as rivals struggle...
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You may never have to see a wedding pic on Facebook again with this app
Photo credit: Galleri5. How many times have you been sick of unwanted, annoying photo posts from friends that clog your social media feed? And how many times has that driven you to unfollow, or even...
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Amazon makes ‘express’ push to woo vendors amid India regulations worry
Jeff Bezos (R) and Amazon India’s Amit Agarwal ride a truck. Photo credit: Amazon. Vendors are the lifeblood of ecommerce marketplaces in India. In the sea of sameness in products, it is the quality...
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Chinese ‘sexual health’ app used for porn, prostitution – because of course...
Pornography and prostitution are both illegal in China. But humans being the sexual creatures that we are, both are fairly readily available to those who seek them. And despite China’s tight control...
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An SXSW winner is building a 911 service app for India, promising help in...
Photo credit: Anthony Kelly. Picture this: on a typical weekday night, a young teenager texts her friends from her bedroom when she hears a loud crash inside her house. Hesitantly, she calls out, but...
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Exclusive: Ola is about to launch a subscription model to fend off Uber
Photo credit: Wikimedia. India’s biggest app-based taxi hailer Ola is all set to launch a new post-paid billing service as soon as next week, two people familiar with the matter told Tech in Asia. The...
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How well do you know the app economy?
It’s a mobile world today. Mobile is changing the way we live: how we consume content, in our daily interactions, the way we exercise (case in point: Pokemon Go), and the list goes on. It has grown to...
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Rakuten acquires fashion marketplace app Fril
Rakuten’s café in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Via Japan Today: Rakuten Inc has acquired a 100% stake in Fablic, provider of FRIL, a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace mobile app and has made the...
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This tech-enabled crystal pendant can keep women safe from assault
Smart safety pendant SAFER. Sunaina had landed at the Delhi airport in the wee hours of the morning and was in a cab when she noticed the driver taking a detour. That made her uneasy. He said he wanted...
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App-schapp. The desktop is here to stay and here’s latest proof
Photo credit : goodluz / 123RF Stock Photo Grofers, one of India’s biggest app-based hyperlocal delivery startups (it delivers everything from grocery to beauty products to your doorstep within 90...
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Grofers 2.0: inside the startup’s big mistakes and learnings
Photo credit: gratisography. In April this year, Grofers ran a sale. The delivery startup was still app-only, and the temptation of getting daily household essentials at cheap rates made droves of new...
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Not your run-of-the mill ecommerce app: meet India’s first online flea market
Photo credit: Yappily. You can discover the most exquisite things at a flea market. Hand-painted glass bottles that don’t just store water but instantly prettify your kitchen; lemongrass natural soap...
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Safe for sex? Many impoverished, rural Indians are finding the answer in an SMS
A community meet by CycleTel under way. Photo credit: CycleTel. “It is often men who pick up the phone and update us about their wives’ menstruation dates.” Ramya Kancharla, who heads the CycleTel...
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A techie launches an astrology startup for worried millennials
Photo credit: saiyood / 123RF. A year ago, Vaibhav Magon’s colleague was looking for career related advice. Vaibhav introduced him to his dad, an engineer who has been practicing astrology for the past...
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Holi selfie: 2 ex-Googlers bring AR to India’s festival of colors with a...
Co-founder Jeyashankher Ramamirtham with three different face filters. Photo credit: MaskUp. Look at the first of the three pictures carefully. It is not a simple snap taken on Holi, the Indian...
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Secrets to app store success: How to outrank your competitors
Mobile apps are almost an integral part of our lives. They cater for almost every aspect of our life – food, travel, games, education, news, lifestyle, and the list goes on. With more than enough...
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Brief: Apple and WeChat battled over in-app purchases
Photo credit: Tech in Asia. The news: Several Chinese social media companies, including WeChat owner Tencent, have lambasted Apple’s claim that user-to-user “tips” count as in-app purchases, of which...
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App that peeks into your phone when you want a loan nabs $1m funding
Photo credit: feriansyah. CredoLab – a Singapore-based startup which has developed a credit risk management solution for emerging market economies – has just closed its pre-series A round. This latest...
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Brief: China’s censors may be blocking WhatsApp
Photo by Microsiervos Geek Crew. The news: WhatsApp users in China have been reporting outages of the messaging app since the start of this week. In particular, it seems that media messages – such as...
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How Line engineers in Taiwan hit pageviews out of the park within 6 months
Image credit: pompix / 123RF Stock Photo In Line Taiwan’s office, developers are watching live baseball matches on their mobile phones. This kind of behavior is surely unacceptable in some workplaces....
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4 innovative logistics and transportation startups at Tech in Asia Singapore...
It’s no secret that logistics in Southeast Asia remain one of the bottlenecks faced by ecommerce players in the region. Factors such as infrastructure and outdated customs processes often add up to...
View ArticleExperts chime in: Now that there’s an app for everything, what’s next?
Apps have become the primary way we engage with media, brands, and ultimately, with each other. As a result, the strategic importance of the app market goes beyond the gaming and media industries....
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