UnicoMarketing: 22 startups in Asia that caught our eye

asian startups weekly list

Here’s our newest round-up of the featured startups on our site this week. If you have startup tips or story suggestions, feel free to email us or tell us about your startup on this form. Any juicy tech news tips go here. Enjoy this week’s list!

1. Relux | Japan

Started early 2013, Relux is operated by Loco Partners and has a hand-selected library of high-quality hotels and ryokan across the country. Ryokan are inns often nestled off the beaten path and known for their traditional-style architecture and amenities. In September, the company received approximately US$3.02 million in a funding round led by Recruit Holdings.

2. Sensbeat | Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s Sensbeat is an Android and iOS app that lets users take photos, add in lines of text, and then choose a song to accompany the graphic. Users can also flip through posts made by members they follow, or can browse through themed categories. The seven-man team recently closed a funding from Big Bloom Investment, PradoSV, and four other undisclosed investors.

3. WOVN.io | Japan

WOVN.io launched its public beta in June and has attracted more than 1,000 users since then – mostly websites that deal with food and beverage, tourism, and entertainment. The service allows visitors to translate a website one HTML tag at a time, offering both machine translation and “premium” human translation (courtesy of crowdsourced translation platform Gengo, a fellow Tokyo startup). New pages are auto-translated as they’re added and a subscription plan (to be implemented soon) allows the site owner to customize the WOVN widget.

4. MagLoft | Indonesia

MagLoft is an emagazine publishing startup which lets users choose templates, drag-and-drop content, and make adjustments via one toolbar at the top of the screen. Users can jump around the project from page to page with an integrated drop-down menu that shows the pages in order. MagLoft’s other competitors include AppzineMachine, PressPadApp, and Issue Stand.

5. Hush | South Korea

Hush is a new social network targeted at school children where everyone stays anonymous. The network is divided into groups according to the respective schools that students are in. Access isn’t restricted, so users can easily join another school’s group if they want to. They can either post a message, or up- or down-vote other messages in these groups.

6. Practo | India

India’s Practo is a doctor discovery and booking platform for patients who wanted to make an informed choice while hunting for the right doctor. By last December, 10 million doctor appointments were booked through the platform. In July 2012, Sequoia Capital came on board with series A funding.

7. Doctor Gratis | Singapore

Developed by Singapore-based startup Health2i, Doctor Gratis lets Android and Blackberry users consult with doctors online through the app, as well as access information about health issues. Health2i debuted its app in Indonesia a couple of years ago, and to date has about half a million downloads. Besides its online push in Africa, the startup is also working with Nigerian doctors to promote the app, which is free to use.

8. Oomph | Indonesia

Much like Apple’s App Store or Google Play, Indonesia’s Oomph is a content distributor. The key difference is that it’s tailor-made just for the Indonesian Android market. It also lets customers pay for their downloads via prepaid mobile credit, which is commonly referred to as “pulsa” in Bahasa Indonesia.

9. Cloud Factory | Nepal

Nepal-based CloudFactory, which allows businesses and individuals to outsource web tasks to workers in emerging markets around the globe, today revealed that it has secured a series A funding. It comes after US$700,000 in seed funding in September 2012. The startup describes it as a virtual assembly line. It also promises that its system can scale to larger tasks.

10. Pozee | Australia

Pozee is an ‘old-fashioned’ dating app from Australia. By using your phone’s location services, the app shows you all the singles who are open to being approached within 50 metres of where you’re standing. A user can ‘announce’ that he/she is single and available to those around him/her by logging in as ‘visible’. If the user is not open to being approached, he or she can log in as ‘private’ instead. Pozee works on the premise that, if both parties know that each other is single, they would feel more comfortable approaching and talking to each other.

11. Clipod | India

ClipPod is a widget to collaborate over Google Calendar. You can manage projects, meetings, and share notes. You can also update colleagues on tasks and sub-tasks, upload presentations, and make appointments. Anyone with a Google or Google Apps account can simply add ClipPod to the Google Calendar, authorize it, and then start using it. No signup or login is needed.

12. Tapway | Malaysia

Malaysia-based Tapway, according to the founder, is the “Google Analytics for the offline world”. Much like Google Analytics, a lot of insight on shopper behavior and activity can be drawn from the data captured on Tapway’s platform, but it is up to the store owner to act on them. The startup’s basic package – which captures metrics such as walk-by traffic, visitor traffic, and average visit duration – relies on wi-fi presence and triangulation technology.

UnicoMarketing

Sunday, 12 October 2014

22 startups in Asia that caught our eye