Shoplette is a social network for shoppers to flaunt their shopping loots to others and also discover what others have purchased. Users post pictures (together with details like price and store location) of what they bought and others can view, rate and comment on the posted items.

In addition to shoppers, Shoplette allows merchants to establish presence on its platform. Merchants can setup Shops to showcase their products. Similar to all items posted on Shoplette, community members can rate and comment on items posted by the merchants. Currently, there are over 200 Shops on Shoplette.

Flaunt It on Shoplette

With its recently launched Shopping Cart Service, merchants can now eCommerce-enabled their Shoplette Shops. Some of its key features are order taking, shopping cart for buyers, PayPal or credit card payment system and also, simple inventory control and order management features. Merchants will be charged US$15 per month for the use of the shopping cart service. Shoplette plans to introduce more pay-as-you-use services in coming months, as part of its monetization strategy.

Shoplette Social Ads?

Besides services, social ads is probably another potential income stream for Shoplette. Peek at any member’s profile page, you can see his/her purchases, preferences and ‘Wish List’ – a potential advertising goldmine. By harvesting the information, Shopholics can deliver more relevant and contextualized ads to members of its social network.

Shoplette is a flagship initiative by Mobrick Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based Web 2.0 technology firm founded by Shannon Low. Launched in May 2008, the site today has over 1200 registered members with over 3000 items posted on its platform.

Shopaholic-Generated Content on Shoplette originally appeared on GreyReview on March 11, 2009.

Snipd is building a social network around clipped web contents; Last.fm with music; Scribd with documents. For Phlook, it’s photos. Since its public beta launch on July 31 2008, Singapore-based Phlook (pronounced as flook) has released a series of improvements to its interface usability and socialability. The most recent ones are “favorite it” and annotation features.

Movable Social Objects

Phlook converted a ‘static’ photo into a Flash interactive one, which can be embedded on any website or blog. Now, this portable photo comes with rating, annotation and email features.

YouTube users can add commentary on videos with Video Annotations; Phlook allows its users to annotate on photo and the annotations are accessible by anyone. Users can also “Favorite” the photo. To try out these features, hover mouse over the burger photo below and slide-out menu will appear on the left. To view the annotations, click on the bottom-left of the photo.

Interactive Phlook’ed Photo

Users can customize a few parameters of the embeddable photo, namely:

• Size: photo display dimension
• View counts: track based “onRollOver” and “onClick”; view tracker can be turn off
• Add clip: appear on top-right corner whenever a mouse hovers over the photo
• Default menu: user access which menu whenever the photo is clicked

In addition to the photo’s social features, its embeddable Slideshow also get a facelift. The new layout and design seem to be more intuitive and responsive. In addition to Phlook website, users can also create Slideshows on Facebook with PicBox application.

Spanking New Slideshow Now Showing at Phlook

Phlook is founded by Wee-Kiat Ng and Justine Ho; funded by Thymos Capital LLP, a Singapore-based private start-up incubator.

Phlook Turns Photos Into Portable Social Objects originally appeared on GreyReview on February 21, 2009.

Foldees is one of the more interesting projects emerging from the Malaysian Web scene in recent years. In a nutshell, it is a greeting cards online store, but with a twist. Instead of employing a team of designers, Foldees is crowdsourcing its design function through the creation of a community of greeting card designers and buyers.

How Foldees Works the Crowd

Foldees holds series of contests to entice and encourage designers to contribute card designs. Each contest has a specific theme – “We are all Geeks” (held in June 2008), “A Comic Book Christmas” (September 2008), “The Game of Love” (November 2008) and its on-going contest with the theme “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Foldees community will rate design submissions for each contest to determine the winners (who will receive cash prizes).

For its first contest, Foldees chalked up 43,504 page views, 24,744 ratings and 1,992 comments. Out of a total of 189 submissions, 70 were selected.

Personalized Greeting Card

Buyers can buy either buy blank cards or customize the cards with personalized messages. Foldees will print the cards (using eco-certified paper) and deliver them to the intended recipients. Each card costs US$2.00. For each card sold, the card designer gets a royalty payment of US$0.10.

Unfolding Foldees

Foldees is owned and operated by Energon Sdn Bhd, a Kuala Lumpur-based company founded by Chak-Onn Lau and Alvin Yu on August 31 2007. According to Lau, they got a healthy dose of inspiration from Threadless, which sells t-shirts designed by its community.

In October 2007, it received the support of the MSC Malaysia Technopreneur Pre-Seed Fund to catalyst its development. Its website went live on June 15 2008 and started selling cards on September 07 2008.

According to Lau, Foldees will be releasing a new feature called @ddress to allow its users to send each other greeting cards without the need of mailing addresses. Also, the site will embrace Facebook Connect and other social networking tools to further ‘socialize’ its platform (Author note: Looking forward to see Foldees on Twitter soon).

The Wisdom of Crowd

Crowdsoucing is increasingly popular in various sectors, from music (e.g. Sellaband) to book (e.g. James Patterson’s AirBourne) to search (e.g. Google SearcWiki) to galaxy probing (e.g. Galaxy Zoo 2. Foldees does seems to make crowdsourcing work. Today, it has over 1,300 registered users with a total of 170 designer greeting cards in its inventory. In addition to generating card designs, it also relies on its community to counter design plagiarism and rip-offs. There may be some wisdom in the crowd, after all.

Greeting Cards by the Foldees Crowd

Look What the Crowd Drags Into Foldees originally appeared on GreyReview on February 19, 2009.

At the present time, 701Panduan provides search utility for finding Malaysian businesses, places and directions. 701Panduan Sdn Bhd, a MSC Malaysia status company, is 50/50 joint venture between SPH Interactive International Pte Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singapore Press Holdings Ltd, and Star Publications (M) Bhd, the two leading newspaper companies in Singapore and Malaysia, respectively. Brand tagged as The Ultimate Source for Local Search with focus on the provision of search services on mobile and web platforms.

To search, users can use with keyword e.g. “hotel” and “snack” or specific brand name e.g. “KFC” and “Royal Selangor.”

701Panduan: Directory Search Engine and Location Finder

Compared to online directory search offered by Malaysia Yellow Pages, 701Panduan offers a much richer search results. Each result comes with the following links:

• Business Info – Expanded company details, namely corporate information, company logo, products/services offered, website, email, payment method
• Map – Location of the business (Note: Some search results don’t have this link).
• Free Call – Call directly to the company via the Web for free.
• Feedback – Users can comment and provide feedbacks about a particular company.

Additionally, users can select a few companies and display them side-by-side for comparison and email them to friends.

701Panduan Search Results

701Panduan’s Map Search (powered by MapKing) enables users to search for places and have the results displayed on its street map. The map is dotted with markers, indicating landmarks e.g. LRT stations, bus stops, hotels, monorails and etc. With its Travel Planning feature, users can obtain directional guide on how to get from point A to point B.

Travel Planning Feature

Unfortunately, the map used by 701Panduan is not, well, appealing. It should instead do a mashup with Google Maps, something similar to Gothere.

With thousands of directory listings, the company’s monetization strategy is still vague. However, its Terms of Use seems to indicate a plan to become more than just a directory search utility, by evolving into an e-marketplace, “an electronic web-based platform for exchanging information between buyers and suppliers of products and services.” Watch this space!

701Panduan, Yet Another Directory Search or an e-Marketplace? originally appeared on GreyReview on February 18, 2009.

Eteract is a social app for singles and positioned itself as an online activities site for singles. Eteract provides a social platform designed and refined for singles to find their love match and interact with one another in a safe and fun virtual environment. In contrast, social networks like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace provide laissez-faire context for social interactions.

Dating, Evolved

Online dating sites have been around since the early days of the Web. Match.com, for example, started operation in 1994. Online dating sites is one of the dominant forms of social network in the pre-Web 2.0 era.

In recent years, there is a rise in the number of specialized dating sites. Examples include BlackSingles, ChristianMingle and JDate. Although these niche sites are operating on the fringe, Anderson’s Long Tail argued that these “narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”

The surging popularity of social networking sites offers alternative avenues for people to socialize, find a date and even, a love match. In some ways, these social networks are encroaching into online dating’s marketspace. Maybe, that’s why research company Nielsen observed significant increased ads spending among online dating sites since 2003.

But online dating sites too are getting ‘social’ with the use of prevailing social networking tools to complement its online dating services. Case in point: Eteract.

Eteract as a Social Platform

Similar to social networking sites, Eteract offers profile page, search engine and messaging. Users can add friends and keep track of their activities on Eteract. Dating oriented utilities include 3D Chat, Online Speed Dating and My Match recommendation engine.

Users can also create avatars and accessorize them with premium add-ons, which can be purchased with clams, the Eteract currency. With $15, for example, you can buy 100 clams.

Clams can also be used at Eteract’s Gift Shop, a place where users can buy virtual gifts for one another. After the 3-day free trial period, services like Online Speed Dating and 3D Chat become paid services, payable in (you guess it!) clams. Alternatively, users can subscribe to its Premium membership and get unlimited access to the services.

Avatarize Yourself

3D Chat is group chat on steroid. It allows you to converse with other Eteract members in chatrooms with souped-up interfaces. Members can also join Clubs, which are groupings around interest, cause and activity.

Avatars in Themed Chatroom

To complement its virtual chat, Eteract provides Online Speed Dating for one-to-one conversation with your ‘match’ via webcam or text chat. At the end of the 3-minute interaction, you can decide whether to explore further with the ‘match’ or not.

Online Speed Dating

Eteract has put in place measures to enhance the accuracy of information provided by its users. In Singapore, they conduct identity card verification and marital status check. They also allow members to report abuses to minimize incidences of frauds.

Eteract, a Singapore-based startup, is the online venture of Lunch Actually, Asia’s largest lunch dating service agency. Eteract has just completed its development phase and is already available in three countries – Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

A Walled Garden for Singles-Only Named Eteract originally appeared on GreyReview on February 14, 2009.

Elevyn is among the 100 web/IT projects selected for this year’s NetExplorateur 100. Besides Elevyn, another Malaysian start-up, Tumpang (bulk-buying platform) is also selected.

Both Elevyn and Tumpany are among 23 projects selected from the Asian region. Other projects from Asia are SharedCopy (Singapore), Enswer.me (Korea), iKnow (Japan), QiFang (China), Juice (China), Asia Online (Thailand), &D Card (Korea), Beam (India), Comi Asia (Singapore), Duedee (China), Ee PC 701 (Taiwan), GazoPa (Japan), iKnow! (Japan), Internet Umbrella (Japan), MetaCard (Singapore), New Songdo City IBD (Korea), OK CouFun (Korea), Rang De (India), Sekai (Japan), SENS (Japan) and Zoho Writer (India).

The NetExplorateur 100 list is created by Forum Nexplorateur, organized by the French Senate. The Forum selects 100 innovative projects from around the world each year and the top 10 winners will be invited to Paris to present to the Senate. Only two from Asia made it to this year’s Top 10 NetExplorateurs of the Year namely, Sekai (Japan) and New Songdo CIty IBD (Korea).

Elevyn Selected for NetExplorateur 2009 originally appeared on GreyReview on January 12, 2009.

Elevyn is a social purpose e-commerce platform. Developed by Mike Tee and Devan Singaram, Elevyn aspires to assist marginalized communities to improve their economic well-being by (a) encouraging and enabling them to trade online with socially conscious consumers from across the world and (b) a more effective means to raise money for social causes.

This venture is probably what Bill Drayton described as social entrepreneurship, which involves a combination of pragmatic and results-oriented methods of a business entrepreneur with the goals of a social reformer.

Social Economy on Elevyn

Anyone can signup for free at Elevyn. Members can support / suggest a cause and setup an online shop. Preferably, the online shop sells products made by the community artisans and the community members manage the online shop, from creating product catalog to product packing to delivery to customers.

Every online shop on Evelyn is also encouraged to must support a Cause. A portion of every sales made through the online store will fund the Cause. After each completed transaction, a buyer will automatically see how is channeled to the Cause.

An example, “raise $200 to buy books for kindergarten.” Evelyn takes 5% for each sales and also 10 cents for each item listed on its online product catalogue. Another 5% goes to PayPal with the remaining 85% will be collected by the seller. Once the fund reaches the target $200, Evelyn will send it to field coordinator to fulfill the Cause (which is, purchase books for the kindergarten).

Online Shop at Evelyn

Besides purchasing products, a member can also contribute by (a) joining the cause, (b) making a donation and (c) raising awareness of the cause by embedding widget on website.

Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Elevyn took 8 months to develop its front-end interface; it was launched on November 11 2008. The company is currently developing backend analytic engine that is able to calculate optimum selling price for each country, by aggregating prices on its platform.

Elevyn Empowering Fringe Communities originally appeared on GreyReview on November 29, 2008.

EzyPzy (pronounced as “eezy-peezy”) is a web utility for managing information delivery cycle, from contacts management to sending out of text messages and emails to target audience.

Founded by Aaron Gill in 2006, the MSC Malaysia status start-up can easily passed off as yet another business contacts repository service, as offered by players like Plaxo, LinkedIn and Xing. Although its contacts management comes with nice features like highly customizable Contact Form and flexible tagging, it acts more like a complementary function to its web/mobile information delivery.

Information Push and Pull

EzyPzy’s Listings offers information-on-demand (information pull) facility. Here’s how it works. Create a Listing from EzyPzy’s web, Ajaxy interface. Each Listing is assigned an Ezykode.

For example, an Ezykode for a restaurant can be “Daily Specials.” The Ezykode is promoted on the restaurant’s promotional materials and those interested to find out more about the daily promotions can text message “EZY Daily Specials” to 36881. The restaurant owner can choose either to send out text-based (SMS) promotion information or pictures (MMS) to the requester. The mobile number of the requester will be automatically entered into the restaurant’s contacts list on EzyPzy.

This information pull service by EzyPzy can adapt to many settings, be it selling of real estate and automobile and also sending daily updates to conference participants.

EzyPzy Dashboard

Users can also create Campaign, which involves sending emails and/or text messages to predefined contacts/leads (information push).

The EzyPzy Menu

EzyPay charges service ‘subscription’ fee, per-month basis. Fee ranging from RM0 to RM300, depending on the size of contacts repository and number of Listings (see Table below). At any time, a user can easily upgrade (and downgrade) their usage plan.

The Pricing Plan

On top of the ‘subscription’ fee, EzyPzy also charges its customers a standard rate of RM0.15 per SMS and RM0.30 per MMS for text messages sent out from EzyPzy system.

From Features to Solution

According to Founder and CEO Aaron Gill, EzyPzy was originally conceptualized as a tool to assist real estate agents to manage their property listings online and push information to their potential leads via mobile phones. As development progressed, the application organically grew and became an integrated information delivery solution.

EzyPzy continues to grow by adding layer upon layer of features and capabilities, in order to differentiate itself in the marketplace. In coming months, the company will introduce new features and functionalities:

• Embeddable customizable contact form, which can be embedded on any website; contact details entered into the form are automatically stored to EzyPzy contacts repository,
• Automated contact details capture of scanned name cards, and
• Scheduler for its email and SMS Campaign.

Launched in May 21 2008 during the World IT Congress in Kuala Lumpur, EzyPzy has over 150 clients storing over 12,000 contact records. The company is one of the first five recipients of the MSC Malaysia’s Technopreneur Pre-Seed Fund.  EzyPzy has been used in two major events in Malaysia, namely the Monsoon Cup and Miss Malaysia Indian Global Pageant. Besides Malaysia, the company has started offering its service in Singapore.

Information Pull / Push Made Easy by EzyPzy originally appeared on GreyReview on November 27, 2008.

The pioneering mobile SMS-based search provider, Yellotext is collaborating with Carrefour in Malaysia, by making grocery promotional offers by the French hypermarket giant searchable on its search platform.

Now, Carrefour Malaysia’s customers can find out latest offers and promotions, by texting “ASK Carrefour Groceries Promo” to 36869. Grocery promotion information (product details and prices) will be sent directly to the customers’ mobile phones via SMS. Each text message ASK query will be charged RM0.30.

Carrefour Promotions. Search Anytime, Anywhere with Yellotext

For Carrefour, this search service offers added convenience to its shoppers (especially bargain hunters), by making its promotion information searchable via text message. It also provides the hypermarket giant the ability to narrowcast promotion information to targeted audience, as information delivery is only triggered by users’ search query (information on-demand, on-the-go). In this case, it’s about delivering the right information to the right person at the right time!

This search utility adds a new dimension to Carrefour’s marketing arsenal and complementing its existing broadcast medium – newspaper ads, catalogue, poster. Promotion offers for the period November 28 – December 10 2008 at Carrefour Malaysia are already searchable on Yellotext, as of today.

For Yellotext, this collaboration looks set to further catalyze its users’ growth. Currently, the company is exploring opportunities with more companies in other sectors to organically grow its user-base and expand its search directory.

Carrefour Grocery Promotions Now Searchable on Yellotext originally appeared on GreyReview on November 26, 2008.

Six recipients of MSC Malaysia’s Technopreneur Pre-Seed Fund Programme were paraded by Roslan Bakri Zakaria of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) during Startup Camp KL yesterday. The six Pre-Seed’ed projects:

• Elevyn, web-based platform that connects community-based sellers to a socially-conscious market
• EzyPzy, contact management, information repository and information distribution web application
• Urekalabs, creator of videoAD and roo.my
• Thisisbinding.com, print, photocopy and bind your work
• TeDDology, social network for Malaysia’s technopreneurs
• SocialWalk, social network that revolves around events

Budding Ventures

Devan Singaram (Elevyn), Kenneth Kiffer Fong (EzyPzy), Roni Shah Mustapha (Urekalabs), Hakim Albasrawy (Thisisbinding), Asyraf Abdul Rahman (TeDDology) and Tham Keng Yew (SocialWalk), together with Roslan Bakri Zakaria, shared their experiences applying for the Pre-Seed Fund and also their start-up adventures. 

For those interested, some key considerations when applying for the Fund:

1. All you need is an idea (with some elements of IT, of course). 
2. The “Application Form” is important (and probably the most time-consuming).
3. Have a right revenue model (e.g. target market and how you plan to get to that market)
4. Research on your competitors
5. Technology innovation
6. Business innovation
7. Present your ideas, concisely
8. Time and pace yourself during presentation
9. Reference – letter of support is helpful
10. Know your facts related your business ideas

Budding Ventures Showcased at Startup Camp KL ’08 originally appeared on GreyReview on November 23, 2008.

ASK is a new SMS-based directory search service by Yellotext Sdn Bhd. It enables users to find whereabouts of desired items and also contact details of their favorite shops from its ASK Listing directory, anywhere, anytime.

To use the search service, just type “ASK” followed by a search query e.g. “ASK hair salon curve” or “ASK hair salon” and then send to 36869. The search engine can also ‘understand’ queries in natural language e.g. “ASK looking for a hair salon at gardens.” Response time is typically under a minute (depending on network conditions).

Simple Steps to ASK Yellotext

Some search results are followed by supplementary mobile vouchers called ASK Poster (adopting Google AdWords concept). Poster is designed for merchants to send promotional vouchers to Yellotext’s search users and each Poster is tagged to a set of search keywords.

Someone who searches for a bookstore, for example, is probably more likely to have an intention to buy books. She will find a discount voucher for books useful and relevant (and timely). With ASK Poster, bookstore operator can effectively respond to purchase intention by enticing customers with promotional offers.

Mobile voucher is free to all ASK users. Instead, Yellotext charges merchants based on the number of times their vouchers are delivered to search users. Additionally, merchants pay for listing on the ASK search directory and search users pay RM0.30 for each set of search results.

Txt Msg Rules, Still

SMS usage is still showing strong growth. A recent market report “2008 Global Mobile – Data and Content Markets” by Research and Markets estimated over 2 trillion text messages will be sent worldwide in 2008 and the number is expected to grow further. “Market Trends: Mobile Messaging, Worldwide, 2006 – 2011” by Gartner also expected text messages to surpass 2 trillion in 2008; Asia-Pacific and Japan are the biggest users of mobile messaging with estimated 1.7 trillion messages to be sent in 2008. Gartner also estimated mobile messaging revenue to reach US$60.2 billion in 2008, a 15.7% increase over 2007.

In Malaysia, 56.9 billion text messages were sent in 2007 alone (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission). That’s about a billion text messages sent each week!

According to Chow Tuck Mun, CEO of Yellotext, ASK service “combines the two widely used applications, search and SMS.” Its ASK Poster is a well thought out approach to SMS marketing. Conventional bulk SMS marketing is spam-oriented whereas Poster is driven by users’ intentions and allows contextualized mobile marketing. Rather than simply throwing spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks, ASK makes SMS marketing more targeted, intelligent, effective and less intrusive.

ASK search is in early commercialization stage and its directory already has over 3,000 records (and growing) covering eight major shopping malls in the Klang Valley area – Pavilion, Suria KLCC, Berjaya Times Square, Mid Valley, The Gardens, 1Utama, The Curve and Sunway Pyramid. Currently, the ASK service is only available to subscribers of the three main Malaysian mobile carriers – Maxis, DiGi and Celcom.

You ASK, Yellotext Answers originally appeared on GreyReview on November 15, 2008.