The ruble’s latest dead cat bounce is over

The ruble has spent the second half of the year in a free fall, on the back of sanctions and plunging oil prices. The situation got so bad that the Central Bank of Russia had to essentially give up using its foreign exchange reserves to prop up the currency, relying instead on a rash of steep interest rate hikes. Things are grim, and the Russian economy contracted last quarter for the first time in five years.

But Tuesday saw a brief rally, with the ruble up 8.6% in the second-biggest daily gain of the year (the biggest came after the latest rate hike). A Reuters story points to state companies selling their foreign cash hoards into a thin market:

Analysts at Nordea Bank said the early surge was probably driven by forex sales by one of Russia’s state exporters, which were recently ordered to sell part of their overseas revenues to support the rouble.

A Finance Ministry official was unable to immediately say whether the ministry had sold foreign currency left over on its accounts on Tuesday.

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The ruble’s latest dead cat bounce is over

‘Father of Viagra’ gets knighthood

The man who calls himself the “father of Viagra,” the drug used to treat erectile disfunction, joined the ranks of Brits knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Dr Simon Campbell received the knighthood “for services to Chemistry” in the annual New Year’s Honours, according to the official list of awards, placing him in the same elite company as Sir Elton John and Sir Richard Branson.

And many today are surely grateful for his services, especially the little blue pill that went on sale in 1998.

Campbell doesn’t want to be called the inventor of Viagra as he is “not on the patent,” he told the BBC. He worded his achievements perfectly, however: “If you want, I would say I was the father of Viagra because I laid the seed and started the project.”

Viagra came about as a result of a side effect, when one of the drugs for high blood pressure Campbell was working on proved to help with blood flow to the penis.

Campbell had a long career at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, where he helped develop medication for high blood pressure, angina and prostate enlargement.

A real-life mad scientist, Martyn Polyakoff, professor at the University of Nottingham, was also knighted in the New Year’s Honours. He’s a leading researcher in the field of sustainable and green chemistry, but better known as a YouTube star. Polyakoff, with his crazy, gray hair is the face of the popular “Periodic Table of Videos” YouTube series.

‘Father of Viagra’ gets knighthood

How the Mumbai police managed to block Vimeo and Github in India

The Indian government’s decision to ban 32 websites—including Github and Vimeo—has been in the works for over a month, according to documents reviewed by Quartz.

On Nov. 11, 2014, Mumbai’s additional chief metropolitan magistrate ordered the Indian government’s department of electronics and information technology (DEIT) to act on a complaint received by the city’s Byculla Police Station and block the sites on a “top priority basis.”

Certain contents on the sites “appear to be posted with the intention of creating unrest, breach of peace, and communal disharmony,” the court said. “This might result in law and order problem in India.”

Anti-terror request

Then, on Nov. 15, Maharashtra’s anti-terrorism squad (ATS) also dispatched a letter requesting DEIT to block 32 websites that “were being used for jihadi propaganda.”

“It was stated that anti-national group are using social media for mentoring Indian youths to join the jihadi activities,” DEIT said in a statement.

The ATS noted that some of these sites were being used by ISIL (a.k.a Islamic State or IS) to “motivate other Indians.”

For instance, they had been used to disseminate information about Areeb Majeed—a 23-year-old from Kalyan, who had apparently joined ISIL in Iraq—and Anwar Husain, an Indian national from Karnataka who reportedly died while fighting in Afghanistan in 2014.

“These websites works on page hosting concept. Many of these websites does not require any authentication. Other upload articles, videos or photos or to download the contents which helps to hide the identities,” DEIT said.

“These websites were being used frequently for pasting (and) communicating such content by just changing page name even blocking the earlier one,” it added.

Some unblocked

DEIT said that it had reached out to some of the 32 website, and a few had already “undertaken not to allow pasting of such propaganda information.”

Subsequently, four websites—Weebly, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Github—are being unblocked.

However, the fate of the remaining 28 websites remains unclear.

This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.

How the Mumbai police managed to block Vimeo and Github in India

Indian government orders ISPs to block Vimeo, Github, and 30 other sites

A number of Indian web users are reporting that they are unable to access websites such as Pastebin, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and Github while using internet providers such as BSNL, Vodafone, and Hathway.

This appears to stem from an order reportedly issued by India’s Department of Telecom on December 17, directing internet service providers to block 32 websites.

Pastebin acknowledged the block on its Twitter account on December 26. The other affected sites have yet to comment.

Pastebin is still blocked in India. We are getting many reports about this. The Indian government has blocked us,… http://t.co/6jqnHcgtIP

— Pastebin.com (@pastebin) December 26, 2014

The order from the Indian authorities was shared on Twitter by Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Insane! Govt orders blocking of 32 websites including @internetarchive @vimeo @github @pastebin #censorship #FoEx pic.twitter.com/F75ngSGohJ

— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) December 31, 2014

The notification mentions that 32 sites – including Pastebin, video sharing sites Vimeo and DailyMotion, internet archive site Archive.org, and Github (a web-based software code repository) – have been blocked under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Prakash also speculated on Twitter that the blocks are caused by a copyright claim, but that has not yet been confirmed independently.

Terrorism threats?

Arvind Gupta, head of the BJP’s IT division, tweeted that the websites were blocked for carrying content from muslim extremist group ISIS that represents a threat to India.

The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti Terrorism Squad, and were carrying Anti India content from ISIS. 1/2

— Arvind Gupta (@buzzindelhi) December 31, 2014

The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the on going investigations, are being unblocked. 2/2

— Arvind Gupta (@buzzindelhi) December 31, 2014

This is not the first time Indian web users have faced issues with accessing certain websites. In 2012, due to a John Doe order, Indian users were unable to access Vimeo, DailyMotion, Xmarks, and PasteBin across various networks for a period of time. The order was based on a complaint by a film distributor company. In the past, it’s mainly been file-sharing websites that have been blocked in India.

More recently, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, multiple sites – including Google Documents – were blocked, as per instructions from the Delhi High Court. This was due to a complaint by a media company owned by Sony, who held the rights to broadcast the World Cup in India.

We will update this story as it develops.

See: China blocks thousands of non-sensitive sites in brash move to censor a few ‘bad eggs’

This post Indian government orders ISPs to block Vimeo, Github, and 30 other sites appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Indian government orders ISPs to block Vimeo, Github, and 30 other sites

How financiers fighting for extra milliseconds are bring broadband to North America’s frozen wastes

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The Arctic Fibre cable.(Telegeography)

Why would anyone spend $850 million laying a fiber-optic cable between Tokyo and London, passing through some of the coldest, most remote parts of the world, when it would speed up existing data transfers rates only by 24-thousandths of a second?

For financial firms, 24 milliseconds can be a pretty big trading advantage. Today, it takes 154 milliseconds to send data from Tokyo to London. Once the Arctic Fibre cable, a new submarine connection passing through the Northwest Passage, has been laid and lit up in 2016, the 15,600-km (10,000-mile) journey will be 15% faster, according to a fascinating article about the cable in IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Seafarers have been using the Northwest Passage for centuries. In the summer, when the ice melts, the narrow route through Canada’s northern archipelago reduces travel time for modern ships by an estimated four days compared to going via the Panama Canal (though this varies depending on starting and ending points). The new cable will take advantage of the same short cut.

In the process, however, it will also bring broadband internet to nearly 60,000 Canadians and just over 25,000 Alaskans who previously had to rely on satellite to get online. Indeed, so slow are existing connections, Arctic Fiber‘s CEO “had to use a courier to send his 227-page environmental report on the cable to the review board in Cambridge Bay, a hamlet in Canada’s most northern province,” according to IEEE Spectrum. The fiber link is expected to go live early in 2016.

 

How financiers fighting for extra milliseconds are bring broadband to North America’s frozen wastes

How psychologists used a mobile game to make airport baggage screening better

Baggage screening officers at airports are good at spotting common suspicious objects. They’re less good at spotting rare ones—the kind that appear only once in hundreds or thousands of bags. How to improve their success rate? Monitoring them all and giving them feedback would be very labor-intensive. A research team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has devised another method, by crowdsourcing knowledge from millions of people playing a game on their mobile devices.

The researchers partnered with Kedlin, the developer of Airport Scanner, a game that simulates an airport X-ray, where players try to identify prohibited items by tapping on their screens. Kedlin provided anonymous data from more than 2 billion plays on over 7 million mobile devices from January 2013 to November 2014. (People who downloaded the game were asked if they would consent to data collection.) That gave the researchers a far bigger dataset, for far less work, than they could have amassed by monitoring real-life baggage screeners.

They found that when a target was particularly rare, players were much more likely to miss it. And when two different banned items appeared in a bag, one of them was more likely to be missed than if they were both identical. Stephen Mitroff, the lead author of the research paper (pdf) published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, told Quartz that the results would serve as feedback for airport security officers and radiology groups, since his team works closely with the Transportation Security Administration. But more broadly, he said, the work demonstrates the potential of mobile technology to gather large quantities of crowdsourced data for academic research that’s hard to do in a laboratory.

This kind of crowdsourcing isn’t new. Take the ESP game (pdf), an academic study that challenged people to match words to images—a task computers aren’t so good at—and eventually helped Google return better search results for online images. Researchers have also been turning to Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s platform for crowdsourced work. But Mitroff says what’s new in this study is the partnership with a specific game. Psychologists have a long history of using game-like interfaces to intrigue participants, and this experiment could encourage scientists to try existing mobile games that happen to tap into cognitive abilities, he says. It could, the report says, be applied to memory games, go/no-go games like Whac-A-Mole, and games that require the user to identify differences in side by side images.

How psychologists used a mobile game to make airport baggage screening better

Our favorite economics paper of 2014 has four authors with the same surname

For an economics paper, it is mercifully short. Written by Goodman, Goodman, Goodman, and Goodman (hereafter Goodman et al), the paper “is the first coauthored by four non-related surname-sharing economists,” write the authors in “A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors,” which will be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA). “Our main contribution is showing that such a collaboration is feasible.”

The authors interrogated data from five economics journals running from 1970 to 2012, identifying “nearly 9,000 unique economists, of whom 45% share a surname with at least one other economist in the data. Within that group, 43% share a surname with only one other economist, 17% share a surname with two other economists, and 10% share a surname with more than 10 other economists.”

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Using the the methodology of “introspection, asking around, and scanning http://www.econjobrumors.com threads concerning ‘famous couples’,” the authors found four types of relationships that lead to surname sharing coauthors. These include married economists, whose output includes classics such as Romer and Romer (2013) on monetary policy, Reinhart and Reinhart (2010) on macroeconomic crises, Summers and Summers (1989) on financial markets, Ostrom and Ostrom (1999) on public goods, Ramey and Ramey (2010) on parental time allocation, Ellison and Ellison (2009) on internet-based price elasticities and Friedman and Friedman (1990) on personal choice.

The second type of surname sharers are siblings. “Kehoe and Kehoe (1995) on general equilibrium models, Dal Bo and Dal Bo (2011) on social conflict” are good examples—though the Goodmen note a dearth of sister co-authors, “pointing to a substantial gap in the literature.”

Other types are rarer. The authors found only three parent-child coauthors, including a three-author paper by Tremblay, Tremblay, and Tremblay (2011), “written by two parents and their son studying a Cournot-Bertrand model of competition.” Only one grandparent-grandchild pair was found, Modigliani and Modigliani (1997) on risk-adjusted performance.

Finally, unrelated individuals on the same campus: Only two of these were unearthed.

A shaky argument

The study of namesake coauthors by Goodman et al makes a significant contribution to the field of namesake coauthors, being the first to be written by four namesake coauthors—or so they claim. Some might not be convinced by their argument:

The one example we have uncovered of a published economics paper with four surname-sharing coauthors is Skarbek, Skarbek, Skarbek, and Skarbek (2012), written by two brothers and their two wives. We argue, however, that this research does not diminish our contribution, for two reasons. First, though David and Emily Skarbek are husband and wife economists, Brian and Erin Skarbek are husband and wife attorneys. As such, the paper has only two economist coauthors. Second, when that research project began, both women still had their maiden names. The fourway name-sharing arose only because of two marriages and the resulting name changes that occurred during a lengthy publication process. We therefore suspect that the shared surnames may be endogenous to the publication process itself.

Goodman et al bolster their defense arguing that in any case, the fact that they are unrelated makes their contribution a more notable one. “Nor to our knowledge are we siblings, parents, children, cousins, or any other sort of familial relation. It is, of course, theoretically possible that we share a Goodman-surnamed ancestor in some prior generation, but we have no empirical evidence that this is true,” they write.

But a satisfying ending

There is a big benefit to sharing a last name, Goodman et al argue: The accepted academic use of “et al” often grants glory to the lead author while obscuring the identities of coauthors. But “though the many expected citations to this paper will refer to it as Goodman et al. (2015), such citations will provide equal amounts of publicity to all of us coauthors.”

Like all good academics, the authors suggest areas future researchers could explore:

Future breakthroughs on this topic should be possible. We believe much could be learned if only economists John Turner (University of Georgia), Lesley Turner (University of Maryland), Nicholas Turner (U.S. Treasury Department) and Sarah Turner (University of Virginia) would find a way to work together. Substantial progress might also come from collaboration between Janet Smith (Claremont McKenna College), Jeffrey Smith (University of Michigan), Jeremy Smith (University of Warwick), and Jonathan Smith (College Board), whose work could explore the impact of both surname-sharing and first initial-sharing. Finally, we encourage cousins Erzo F.P. Luttmer (Dartmouth College) and Erzo G.J. Luttmer (University of Minnesota) to consider collaborating for reasons too obvious to state.

The paper will be presented at 7th Annual Economics Humor Session in Honor of Caroline Postelle Clotfelter as part of the annual AEA meeting to be held on Jan. 3-5 in Boston. Past contributions to the session have included “Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan” (Smith, G. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 40:6, 1325-1326 [2008]), which one observer noted “consists of no other insight than the fact that a graph of the [negative] unemployment rate and the inflation rate in Japan looks strikingly similar to a map of the country of Japan.”

Our favorite economics paper of 2014 has four authors with the same surname

A threat from ISIL prompts India to block Github and a handful of other sites

The Indian government has apparently blocked a clutch of websites—including Github, the ubiquitous platform that software writers use for sharing and working on open-source code—because they were carrying “anti-India” content from ISIL (a.k.a. Islamic State or ISIS).

The video site Vimeo, text repository Pastebin.com, and web-hosting provider Weebly have also been affected.

Insane! Govt orders blocking of 32 websites including @internetarchive @vimeo @github @pastebin #censorship #FoEx pic.twitter.com/F75ngSGohJ

— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) December 31, 2014

While Quartz hasn’t been able to verify the authenticity of the document above, almost every website on the list was unavailable early afternoon (local time) via at least two internet service providers.

And we weren’t the only ones.

@centerofright @pranesh_prakash @rsprasad @pierrefitter1 None of the websites in the list opening here.Checked through two ISP connections.

— DeshGujarat (@DeshGujarat) December 31, 2014

The government order doing the rounds on Twitter, if authentic, is dated Dec. 17.

Terror threat

The websites were blocked because they were allegedly carrying anti-India content and on the advice of India’s anti-terrorism squad, according to Arvind Gupta, the national head of the information technology cell at the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The websites that have been blocked were based on an advisory by Anti Terrorism Squad, and were carrying Anti India content from ISIS. 1/2

— Arvind Gupta (@buzzindelhi) December 31, 2014

The sites that have removed objectionable content and/or cooperated with the on going investigations, are being unblocked. 2/2

— Arvind Gupta (@buzzindelhi) December 31, 2014

Gupta clarified that he was speaking as a party representative.

The head of the Indian government’s department of electronics and information technology was not available for comment.

Earlier this month, India’s security agencies went into a tizzy after UK’s Channel 4 News revealed that a prominent ISIL Twitter handle was based out of Bangalore. The authorities moved swiftly to arrest a 24-year-old engineer, Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who had been operating the Twitter account since 2009.

Multiple sites

Pastebin.com—a text storage service—has been complaining since Dec. 19 that its site is inaccessible in India.

http://t.co/e3zRKnJJQO seems to have been blocked in India. If you are from India and unable to visit Pastebin, please email us.

— Pastebin.com (@pastebin) December 19, 2014

As has Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library.

@pranesh_prakash @Vimeo @github @pastebin We’ve received many complaints from people in India who can’t access http://t.co/rvOhn0KKJQ.

— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) December 31, 2014

Any difficulties in accessing Github are sure to be painful for India’s vast army of software developers, who power one of the bright spots of Indian’s struggling economy.

In a testament to Github’s importance, even China’s powerful censors were forced to unblock the site due to its importance for workers in the country’s tech industry.

But India isn’t alone—Russia also banned Github earlier this month.

This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.

A threat from ISIL prompts India to block Github and a handful of other sites

What do makers of PK and the Hindutva protesters have in common?

PK, Aamir Khan’s latest Bollywood film, packs an eclectic punch—a stranded alien, Indo-Pak romantic love, a scheming “godman,” a faux version of rustic desis, Delhi and more.

Hindu Sena, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Yuva Vahini and other Hindutva groups have taken to the streets claiming that PK hurt Hindu sentiments by showing Hindu gods, goddesses and ‘godmen’ in poor light.

But Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Mumbai, Agra, Bareilly, Jammu—regions where militant protests have been staged against the film—do not form an eclectic bunch. They’re all places where the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) triumphed in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP on its part has maintained that it can’t take responsibility for the action of other organizations. It hasn’t opposed the anti-PK protests. Nor has it specifically condemned the intimidating tactic of disrupting the screening of PK in certain cinema halls.

Indians and aliens

But while these protests are purportedly on the grounds that the film offends the sentiments of ordinary Indians, most people in the country would never be able to connect with—or even watch—PK, which is a movie about an alien (named PK) accidentally stranded on earth.

Like much of contemporary Bollywood, the film excludes more Indians than it includes. The contemporary humanoid alien is one of those ideas that have travelled from the West to certain sections of the subcontinent’s elite. Since its first import and subsequent re-imports, it has trickled down to the “masses” but only slightly. Effectively, an alien from another planet is largely an alien concept in the subcontinent.

In the belief of millions, other planets are divine and semi-divine beings unto themselves, not physical homes of other creatures. Science, an increasingly favourite debate-ending and justification tool in certain societies, does not have any evidence supporting the presence of aliens or divines. Depending on which class of Indians you are talking to, aliens are either a concept that does not fit into their general worldview—or is in the far reaches of the realm of possibility.

The folks who will never get to see PK—controversy or not—outnumber all the ones who will buy tickets to see it, by atleast 50 to 1. Anti-PK protesters know it. They know PK is an excuse. PK’s content is irrelevant beyond a point. It’s about barging into an unrepresentative “public” space with a contesting unrepresentative agenda. Game on.

Same-same

The Hindutva groups or even the BJP don’t represent most Hindus. These self-appointed gatekeepers of Hindu sentiments have scarcely won a majority of Hindu votes. “Uneducated”, “superstitious”, “irrational”, “godman”-adoring, believing Hindus have ensured that—time after time. 

But this majority of Hindus and their beliefs are held in utter contempt by the cosmopolitan liberals. And they are hated by the Hindutva folks for their plural, local, non-martial beliefs.

Makers of films such as PK and these protesters who claim to represent the interest of Hindus are actually more similar to each other than they would like to publicly admit. Both seek to exclude things that are not in line with the relative elite that use English and Hindi as its operational tongues, with the former presenting a caricatured version of the subcontinent’s diversity as its face to the world. By sheer money power, insider caste-class networks and predictable urban locations, they seek to limit the lingo and form of ‘public’ debate.

Both secretly wish that they could magically and radically transform the mass’s mentality. They couldn’t care less about the people who find in their sacred groves and holy men some sense of peace and hope. It’s easy for the privileged to vilify the midwives of soul in a soulless world. Mockery couched in the language of secularism doesn’t help. Even the word ‘godmen’ is an invention of the Anglicized cosmo-liberal class.

Exclusive protests

There was a time when justice meant decreasing inequities.

Yesterday, I came upon a protest that involved buying a Rs300 ticket to view PK at a multiplex. Forget boycott. Now it is time for protest by buying, protest by consumption. This deeply exclusionary and undemocratic form of protest is but natural for the upper class.

If I were anyhow associated with the making of the film PK such that greater box office collections would also financially benefit me, I would parrot glib phrases about freedom of speech. I would also talk about the artist’s right to expression, while secretly hoping that the protest kept simmering so that the controversy remained in focus.

Of course, I wouldn’t want the controversies to boil over to an extent that they actually start hitting my bottom-line. Which is why I would have, like many others of the fashionable “artists” freedom of expression” racket, given regular salaams to the Hindu Hriday Samrat of Mumbai (Bal Keshav Thackeray) if he were still alive.

It’s all about hitting the sweetest spot. PK has hit it very sweet indeed reportedly at Rs376 crore and counting.

Follow Garga on Twitter @Gargac.We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.

What do makers of PK and the Hindutva protesters have in common?

Gmail now partially accessible in China, but it’s still seriously screwed up

Five days after Gmail became fully blocked in China as access to it via IMAP and POP stopped working, some people in mainland China are finding that it is now partially accessible.

However, as is often the case with China’s Great Firewall (which is the likely cause of this disruption, some six months after virtually every Google service was blocked in the country), it’s hard to verify what’s going on. But it seems safe to say that Gmail access via third-party apps like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail is not back to normal in in China.

Google’s own real-time Transparency Report tool shows that Gmail traffic in China is still way down on normal levels (pre-December 26), but that a few more people are finding that it works on December 30 and today:

A ping test of Gmail’s IMAP and SMTP servers for sending and receiving emails via other email apps reveal that approximately 30 to 50 percent of pings reach servers, but the rest are blocked within mainland China. See example screenshots here and here.

Anecdotally, I’m finding that it takes anywhere from five to 20 minutes to send a test email to myself from my phone (with the VPN off) to my laptop (with the VPN on). This is one example from today when a mail sent at 10:20am from my phone arrived a full 14 minutes later:

Google has not found any issues with its servers, said the Guardian on Monday, and Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on the same day she was not aware of the blocking of Gmail access via IMAP or POP.

See: 10 of our favorite crowdfunding projects to come out of China this year

This post Gmail now partially accessible in China, but it’s still seriously screwed up appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Gmail now partially accessible in China, but it’s still seriously screwed up

In 2014, Southeast Asia inched towards its first billion dollar exit

People love Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and China’s richest man. Like other successful entrepreneurs, people hang onto his every word (even if they are of dubious origin), and they’re endlessly fascinated by him. How do we know? Articles featuring Jack Ma tend to do well on Tech in Asia and elsewhere.

And that’s why I chose to lead this article with him. But bear with me – I highlighted Ma for another reason: he is single-handedly propping up China’s startup ecosystem. Aspiring tech moguls can now point their parents to the ex-teacher as proof that their startup isn’t a waste of time. Flooded with money, Ma has reinvested back into startups, creating the fabled virtuous cycle so critical to the ecosystem’s survival.

We are still looking for our Jack Ma in Southeast Asia. And while we were still searching in 2014, we are getting close. Here’s a list of key developments in Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem in the past year and what it may mean for 2015.

1. Rise of the founder-investor

Paul Srivorakul (standing up), co-founder and executive chairman of Ardent Capital, is a founder-investor.

The rhetoric towards venture capitalists lacking startup experience has been unkind. Portrayed as ignorant and fickle-minded vultures with no clue about how the tech industry works, entrepreneurs are clamoring for the day when founder-VCs will save the industry from itself. But facts paint a different picture.

A glance at the top ten investors on Forbes’ Midas List shows only four with startup experience. Another writer looked at the top 50 and found only 34 percent with an entrepreneurial background. The rest were either bankers, management consultants, or tech executives. It’s true that good entrepreneurs do not necessarily make good investors, but it can’t hurt to have more of them in the ecosystem, especially in Southeast Asia where investors and limited partners typically consist of real estate, traditional business, or rent-seeking folks who don’t possess the right mindset to invest in startups.

In 2014, we saw a continuation of a trend from the year before where more entrepreneurs got into the investing game, from the seed stage all the way up to series A. The most prominent example is the founding of Monk’s Hill Ventures in Singapore, spearheaded by Match.com founder Peng Tsin Ong. Garena Venture (yes, that’s how it’s spelled) may be considered another example, though it’s unclear how involved the founders are in the investing. Even entrepreneurs from young companies have time and capital to do a little angel investing on the side – RedMart founders backed Edit Suits, while Thailand’s Ookbee invested in edutech company Taamkru.

We’re just seeing the start of this trend. As a new crop of startups in the region list on the public markets or surpass the US$100 million valuation stage, you can expect to witness an accelerated circulation of talent, expertise, and capital through consolidations, pooling of resources, investments, and commercial deals.

See more: Monk’s Hill raises US$80 million, Edit Suits promotes men’s ecommerce, Ookbee invests in Taamkru

2. Government involvement still strong but shifting

Singapore Parliament House.

Complementing the increase in entrepreneur involvement in seed and early stage investments is the sustained (or even increasing) participation from institutional investors and corporations. It’s mostly status quo for telcos like SingTel and Globe, who are continuing to invest in companies through Innov8 and Kickstart respectively. What’s new is a US$60 million fund by Malaysian telco Axiata, though its Bumiputra focus will pose difficulties when deal sourcing. Singapore Press Holdings is one to watch in 2015, and we should expect to see its investment activities kick to high gear after a slow start.

On the government side of things, Malaysia and Singapore have remained especially active. Malaysia of course has MaGIC, a government agency in charge of promoting entrepreneurship. It recently held a week-long bootcamp for startup founders, though it seemed like the euphoria was dampened a bit with a slashed budget for the new year and a shift in focus back towards being a program for all entrepreneurs rather than tech startups. Meanwhile, Malaysian government fund Cradle has inked four co-investment deals with venture capital firms, while the government budget itself contained some goodies for entrepreneurs.

In Singapore, the government pumped more money into the startup ecosystem, though it’s shifting towards startups with stronger intellectual property. It kickstarted the ESVF co-funding scheme, which is like TIS except that it targets series A as opposed to early stage startups. Also, fund managers under ESVF are given more autonomy in decision-making, whereas TIS incubators that want to use government money must get approval from the government. While there’s no official change to the TIS, the approval process has been tightened up with an eye towards proprietary technology.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. If the acronyms confuse you, this handy guide will give you a full handle on what the Singapore government is doing for startups.

Besides coming up with grants and schemes, the state is getting its hands dirty and doing some late-stage investments as well. Sovereign wealth fund Temasek has dipped its hands into pots like ecommerce, the sharing economy, and internet payments with investments in Lazada, Didi Dache, and Adyen respectively. And that’s only a portion of Temasek’s portfolio of internet companies (check out Tech in Asia’s complete coverage of its activities).

While observers advocate that governments should have a hands-off approach towards nurturing startups, this isn’t an option in Malaysia and especially Singapore’s minds. I wrote in an earlier piece how Singapore’s startup scene is overrated:

What Singapore is, or is trying to be, is an aircraft carrier. It’s projecting influence beyond its tiny shores. It’s trying to achieve what Israel now has, but the reverse way. Instead of collecting a global diaspora, it’s letting people go out hoping they’ll maintain ties here, and bringing people in hoping they’ll develop roots in the country.

So until Southeast Asia can boast startup and venture capital activities on the level of China, India, or even Israel, expect heavy government involvement to continue for the next few years. I’d put Indonesia on the watchlist as well given progessive candidate Joko Widodo’s (Jokowi) ascension as the country’s new president. 2015 may be the year where Indonesia finally puts in place startup-friendly policies and programs, though whether businesses want to deal with the bureaucracy is another matter. This will likely be an effort that will span Jokowi’s entire stint as president.

3. Ecommerce continues to attract big money

Continuing my observation from 2013, ecommerce has sustained in receiving the lion’s share of investments into internet companies. Rocket Internet’s Lazada brought in another US$250 million, while online marketplace Tokopedia became the toast of Indonesia’s startup scene by attracting a US$100 million round. Meanwhile, Singapore’s RedMart and Luxola raised US$23 million and US$13 million in 2014 respectively.

The eye-popping investments are not just restricted to marketplace or online retail sites. Ecommerce infrastructure and services are getting a lift too. Alibaba put in a massive US$250 million into Singapore’s national postage and logistics provider SingPost (no doubt to fuel Alibaba’s overseas expansion), while Thailand’s aCommerce received US$10.7 million. Add to that a slew of smaller investments into e-payment companies as well as Malaysian MOL’s listing on NASDAQ, and you have what amounts to a surge in confidence in ecommerce prospects in Asia.

This is a rendering of SingPost’s upcoming regional ecommerce hub.

So what will 2015 bring? It’s likely that big players will be the ones to reap most from this ecommerce bonanza due to economies of scale. With this logic, massive marketplaces (both business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer) and massive online retailers like Tokopedia, Lazada, and Zalora should thrive. RedMart is in a unique position given that it has not quite reached the scale needed to succeed and it’ll probably need a large infusion of cash to do so. The same goes for other players like Luxola, Bellabox, and the tons of venture-backed ecommerce stores. For them, the pressure to earn a return for investors will either lead to bigger fundraising rounds, a quick shutting down next year, or consolidation between competitors to compete with the giants.

See more: Lazada’s $250M round, Luxola expansion, Alibaba invests in SingPost, 10 trends that will shape Southeast Asian ecommerce in 2015, a report on ecommerce in Indonesia

4. The Uber effect

While I’ve delved into this in detail, the effect of Uber’s massive valuation on startups like GrabTaxi is worth mentioning again. Despite Uber’s troubles, it’s reaping massive dividends by betting on logistics-on-demand as the next hot area. Investors are clearly following suit by backing networked transportation companies around the globe. Uber’s story also has the effect of inspiring a wave of startups that want to tackle every aspect of the sharing economy – from boats to parking lots to even hair salons. More Uber-for-X startups will come out in 2015.

5. Untapped potential in Philippines, Vietnam, and frontier markets

Predictably, most splashy startup news this year has centered around the big four: Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Preliminary data on Techlist, our platform for connecting investors with startups, shows that Singapore still leads the region by volume of investments, followed by Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Though Singapore might have to play second fiddle this year if positions are adjusted by sum of investments. Vietnam is definitely a market to watch with successes like Appota and Flappy Bird, though political and legal challenges are now making international investments a challenge. The scene may continue to thrive, just don’t don’t expect to hear as much from it.

The Philippines is trending upwards as well, with a slew of seed investments and even an IPO capturing headlines. Like many developing countries, payments and counterfeit goods will pose challenges to ecommerce firms, but there’s also a lot of potential in the country for healthtech and remittance-related startups. Given its large population and rising middle class, the country is far from its full potential, and hopefully it’ll reach closer to the mark in 2015.

Lastly, we have Myanmar. With the country opening up to the world, we are hearing more stories of entrepreneurs dipping into the frontier market. Going into 2015, we expect the scene to continue staying small due to a host of issues like high rental costs, small talent pool, and an uneducated market.

But give it a few years and a few more intrepid entrepreneurs, and Myanmar might just surprise you.

See more: Myanmar’s startups are on their own for now, but founders have hope

This post In 2014, Southeast Asia inched towards its first billion dollar exit appeared first on Tech in Asia.

In 2014, Southeast Asia inched towards its first billion dollar exit

How do you say Kara Swisher in Chinese? Re/code goes to China with Tencent partnership

Re/code, the tech blog that’s home to All Things D emigres Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, is now available in Chinese. This comes as part of an exclusive partnership with web giant Tencent, which now has a Chinese-language Re/code site as part of its Tech QQ portal. See it here.

The deal was announced on both Tech QQ and Re/code, but the terms of the deal are not disclosed.

This is the third major publishing partnership for Tencent (best known as the maker of messaging app WeChat and IM app QQ), coming after the Business Insider tie-up in February and a deal with The Next Web in September.

There’s also a new Re/code Chinese official account on WeChat, but it hasn’t yet posted anything.

China’s news media is often plagued by copy-paste thefts from other outlets, or, in the case of foreign language media, uncredited translations from English to Chinese. In January this year, TechCrunch’s own Chinese site called out a local tech blog for wholesale translation of news from major sites such as TC, TNW, and All Things D. But Tencent is bucking the trend with legitimate content partnerships for tech news.

While Tencent is best known for social media, it has been ploughing more resources into news and other forms of media – especially streaming video of licensed TV shows and movies – in the past couple of years as it battles other web portals and video sites in China. SY Lau, president of the Tencent’s Online Media Group, told Tech in Asia this summer that Tencent’s Video site is battling closely with Youku to become China’s top video streaming site.

So how do you pronounce Kara Swisher in Chinese? It’s 卡拉•斯威什 – kǎlā sīwēishén.

See: Tencent ready to launch China’s 1st private internet bank, WeBank

This post How do you say Kara Swisher in Chinese? Re/code goes to China with Tencent partnership appeared first on Tech in Asia.

How do you say Kara Swisher in Chinese? Re/code goes to China with Tencent partnership

Sony actually did reveal the split of “Interview” rentals and purchases, because algebra

The online release of “The Interview” fared surprisingly well for Sony Pictures, as the company announced total revenues of $15 million from approximately 2 million sales and rentals. The company didn’t provide a breakdown between $15 sales and $6 rentals, but as teacher Dan Myer pointed out, it didn’t have to—a bit of simple algebra does the job.

Here’s the equation, with x=the number of rentals (and “2,000,000 – x” = the number of sales)

6x + 15 (2,000,000-x)=1,500,000

Solving the equation, x=1.67 million rentals, which means there were 330,000 downloads.

Here’s a link to the math, via Wolfram Alpha (and Daring Fireball).

Read this next: Everything we know about how people watched “The Interview” and what it means for the future of internet video

 

Sony actually did reveal the split of “Interview” rentals and purchases, because algebra

14 of Indonesia’s biggest tech stories in 2014

What is there to say about the past year in Indonesia’s tech space? What actually happened? Quite a bit, in fact. For starters, the government decided to turn Indonesia’s population of cyberattackers into a positive asset when the ministry of defense held a nationwide hacking competition to boost the country’s own cybersecurity.

Additionally, Taiwan’s Foxconn signed a letter of intent to build a factory in the archipelago and invest around US$1 billion over the next three to five years. Local conglomerate Sinar Mas gave US$12.7 million to Ardent Captial for its ecommerce initiatives, GrabTaxi threw its hat into Jakarta’s transport-tech ring, and local classifieds giant TokoBagus rebranded as OLX. But those aren’t even the biggest stories of the year.

With international startups and investors beginning to take a more serious look at Indonesia’s market potential, it’s important to note that 2014 was a year in which Indonesia grew by leaps and bounds. If this year’s Startup Asia Jakarta was any indicator, the country’s tech scene is not showing signs of slowing down. So what were the biggest tech moments of the last 12 months? In no particular order, here are 14 we’ve selected.

1. Bakrie Group invests in Path

In January, Indonesia’s Bakrie Group led a US$25 million series C investment round in Dave Morin’s social network, Path. A lot of people vented frustration about how Path has now tied itself to a controversial conglomerate. Nevertheless, the news came as the premiere major investment by an Indonesian group in a Silicon Valley company.

2. Indonesian citizen convicted of libel on Twitter

Local Twitter user Benny Handoko was sentenced to 12 months probation after the courts found him guilty of posting libelous comments against a politician in the country. The tweet in question was published two years prior to the conviction.

The case was not the first of its kind in the archipelago, but it grabbed the national spotlight this year and sparked a deeper public debate surrounding the imperfect nature of the nation’s Electronic Information and Transaction law.

3. KapanLagi merges with Fimela to become largest online media

In February, online media company KapanLagi merged with Fimela. After the merger was complete, the KapanLagi Network was able to boast 36 million monthly unique visitors, which lead to the media behemoth overrunning fellow big media firms like Kompas and Detik in terms of sheer size.

4. Two telcos join forces for an aggressive ecommerce venture

Indonesian telco XL Axiata and South Korean online and mobile service firm SK Planet, a subsidiary of SK Telecom, joined forces to break into Indonesia’s ecommerce race with a joint venture called Elevenia.

The firm quickly established itself as a take-no-prisoners player as its rapid expansion let it claim 500,000 products from 6,000 sellers by the beginning of March. That makes the newcomer a formidable competitor of local marketplace portals like Tokopedia and BukaLapak.

5. Rocket Internet gets more competitive

Rocket Internet invested even more in Indonesia as it brought consumer-to-consumer ecommerce initiative Lamido (part of the Lazada Group) and automobile marketplace Carmudi to Indonesia.

Rocket Internet’s presence has been a revelation in Indonesia. Clone factory or not, the company has created several ecommerce giants, such as Lazada and Zalora, and continues to grab attention from global investors interested in Southeast Asia.

6. Facebook opens an office in Jakarta

In March, Facebook officially opened an office in Jakarta. Indonesia is one of the social network’s largest user bases, with more than 69 million active users. Dan Neary, Facebook’s Asia-Pacific vice president, said that having an office in Indonesia would allow the company to work closer with some of the its biggest advertisers.

7. Indonesia’s central bank updates epayments regulations

In April, the Bank of Indonesia revised its regulations governing the nation’s epayment services. It recorded a daily average of 420,000 transactions with total value of Rp 7.7 billion (US$652,000) using epayment tools.

The revisions included a mandate that barred local epayment companies from striking exclusive partnerships with online stores. Another revision dealt with the minimum balance that customers need to keep inside an epayment service when withdrawing money. The minimum balance was reduced to zero.

8. Indonesia blocks Vimeo, Reddit, and Imgur

Indonesian authorities were keen to block online porn this year. While sites like Vimeo, Reddit, and Imgur are not pornographic sites, they allow R-rated content which can include nudity. All three sites were blocked by the Indonesian government in May this year.

However, at Startup Asia Jakarta 2014, the nation’s new information and communications technology minister, Rudiantara, said he was in talks with Vimeo about restoring the nation’s access, provided that the site could censor its R-rated material for the Indonesian public.

The debate surrounding censorship is Indonesia is a hot one, as nude videos can be found on YouTube at present, and locals can even browse through nude pictures on Twitter and Google.

9. Apple opens office, but still no stores

After more than a year of whispers and anticipation, Apple opened an office in Indonesia in May. The office opened at the World Trade Center II building in Jakarta – the same building as Baidu Indonesia and Intel Indonesia. There’s still no word on Jakarta’s first Apple Store that we know of.

With no official stores in the nation, Indonesians can only buy Apple products online or through authorized reseller stores.

10. Indosat and SoftBank launch a $50M venture fund, but take their time investing

Indonesian telco Indosat joined forces with Japanese telco SoftBank to launch SB ISAT, a US$50 million venture capital fund which zeroes in on Indonesian growth-stage startups. In September, Indosat CEO Alexander Rusli said the fund had looked at 16 potential investees so far but has yet to find one it’s keen to work with.

Rusli explained the fund needs to be rigorous and careful in its selection process as the fund is looking to dole US$5 million to US$15 million a pop.

11. Local hackers protect Indonesia’s democracy

2014 was a monumental election year for Indonesia. In what was one of the most intensely fought political battles the archipelago has ever seen – amid concerns of electoral fraud, both candidates claimed victory, leading to weeks of nationwide confusion – a group of Indonesian netizens implemented a 700-person team of volunteers who counted the vote tally documents manually and published the count result on its website in real-time.

The team, which called itself Kawal Pemilu (Guard the Election), was later hit by hundreds of online attacks from mysterious hackers trying to interfere with its mission of democratic transparency. Ultimately, the core five-man team was able to fight off the attacks.

12. Xiaomi crashes the party

In August, the widely-popular Chinese gadget manufacturer Xiaomi launched in Indonesia. Xiaomi and its local ecommerce partner, Lazada Indonesia, claim that they sold the entire batch of 5,000 Xiaomi Redmi 1S phones in just seven minutes during the first online flash sale in the nation.

In November, Xiaomi’s VP of international, Hugo Barra tweeted that the Redmi Note sold out its stock of 10,000 units in less 40 seconds.

At Startup Asia Jakarta 2014, Barra said he is seeing “higher emotion volume than even in China” among fans in India and Indonesia.

13. Tokopedia sets record for largest tech startup investment

On October 22, local online marketplace Tokopedia set the record for the largest funding round ever for an Indonesian tech startup after it announced a US$100 million investment. The funding is from Japan’s SoftBank and India’s Sequoia Capial.

The news made serious waves in the local tech startup scene and grabbed international headlines. The investment lead to speculation about whether SoftBank and Sequoia are now trying to recreate the success they saw with China’s Alibaba as early investors.

14. Indonesia gets 4G service from all 3 major telcos

Earlier this month, Indonesia’s three largest telcos – Telkomsel, XL Axiata, and Indosat – announced they were launching 4G LTE services nationwide. Last year, Indonesia got a taste of 4G with the Bolt mobile device. However, issues later emerged about the Bolt’s sub-par performance accompanied by a high price tag.

Editing by Steven Millward; lead image from Muhammad Rasyid Prabowo 

This post 14 of Indonesia’s biggest tech stories in 2014 appeared first on Tech in Asia.

14 of Indonesia’s biggest tech stories in 2014