Facebook Credits virtual currency platform set to expand its payment options in Asia. Facebook and MOL Global just announced a strategic partnership to enable the purchase of Facebook Credits using MOLPoints, an online micropayment system developed and managed by Malaysia-based MOL, one of the largest internet companies in South East Asia.

Credits, the official virtual currency on Facebook, enables the purchase of gifts and virtual goods for games and applications on Facebook platform. Popular games like Farmville, Millionaire City, Hotel City, Petville, Bejeweled Blitz, Hotel City, Barn Buddy, Likeness and hundreds other games and applications are already accepting Facebook Credits (up-to-date list of games here). There are over 200 million unique Facebook users playing games each month. Soon, these social gamers can buy Credits using MOLPoints. And they can reload the MOLPoints through MOL’s network of over 500,000 physical (e.g. 7-Eleven, cybercafes, bookstores), online banking and mobile payment channels, in over 80 countries.

“The relationship with Facebook demonstrates MOL’s growing role as a leading payment provider for social networking sites in Asia, especially in our core countries of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and India,” said Ganesh Kumar Bangah, group chief executive officer for MOL Global.

He added, “Over the last few quarters, we have seen a double-digit increase in payment transactions and payment volume. This partnership continues MOL’s momentum to build the largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network in Asia.”

According to Vaughan Smith, director of business and corporate development at Facebook, “working with MOL means we can offer the benefits of Facebook Credits to millions of people in Asia using a payment system that is already widely used and trusted. We’re investing in the long-term future of Facebook Credits and we view this agreement as a major opportunity to broaden the availability of a simple, unified currency that can be used in games and applications across Facebook.”

Currently, Facebook users can purchase Facebook Credits using credit cards and Paypal. However, they can also earn Credits via other means, such as drinking a Slurpee.

In Asia, the availability of physical channels to pay for Credits can further spur the virtual goods economy on Facebook. The 18-to-24 is the largest age group in most Asian countries – Indonesia, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam among others. Many in the age group don’t own a credit card. Also, Asian gamers are spending big money and today, the virtual goods market in Asia is worth $7 billion!

UPDATES
(1) Signing of strategic partnership between MOL Global and Facebook

(2) Official press release

Coming soon: Facebook Credits available at retail stores in Asia originally appeared on GreyReview on July 8, 2010.

Extracts from the 10th Malaysia Plan (2011 – 2015) speech by Prime Minister Najib this morning, related to IT industry and stimulating the emergence of startups in Malaysia:

• Encouraging entrepreneurship: “…bankruptcy laws will be simplified to support a risk-taking culture, eliminate the stigma of failure and allow high calibre and credible entrepreneurs who fail to become active again (p 20);
• National Key Economic Areas, NKEAs: Information and communication technology, ICT as one of the 12 NKEAs (p. 15).
• Focus on soft infrastructure development: The 10th Malaysia Plan’s “allocation for non-physical infrastructure will be increased to 40%, compared with 21.8% in the 9MP. Focus will be given to skills development programmes, R&D activities and venture capital funding geared towards promoting a higher level of innovation in the country” (page 14);
• Growth funds: Mudharabah Innovation Fund “with an allocation of 500 million ringgit, will be introduced to provide risk capital to government venture capital companies” and Business Growth Fund “to bridge the financing gap between the early stage of commercialisation and venture capital financing for high tech products” (p. 20);
• Technology-driven development of NKEAs: “the application of high technology will be emphasised in the development of NKEAs. Technology platforms such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and high-end engineering will further increase the impact of the NKEAs on economic growth” (p. 16);
• Competition Law: The Law “will be introduced to provide a regulatory framework against market manipulation and cartel practices that may affect market efficiency” (p. 17);
• Working Capital Guarantee Scheme: Additional RM3 billion allocation for the Scheme, which is designed to “ensure that the SMEs have better access to financing facilities” (p 24).

Full speech transcript here.

10th Malaysia Plan on IT, entrepreneurship and startups, announced by PM @najibrazak originally appeared on GreyReview on June 10, 2010.

Countdown begins for echelon 2010 (formerly known as unConference Singapore). And tomorrow is the last day for early-bird registration for Asia’s leading web technology event, taking place in Singapore from June 1st to 2nd 2010. This year event is bigger, in terms of number of participating startups and speakers, better – format and bolder – breadth of content. Confirmed speakers include @DaveMcClure (Founders Fund), @Joi (Creative Commons), @Gen (Mozilla) and Ming Yong (Social Wok, winner of TC50 ’09 Demopit). Social gaming, cloud computing, enterprise 2.0, location-based and social media are the key focus of this year’s event (full agenda here). A total of 50 startups will be showcasing their products at the event and ten product launches during the Startup Launchpad session. Registration here.

Some photos from last year’s event:












(photos from unConference ’09 on Flickr)

echelon 2010: bigger, better, bolder originally appeared on GreyReview on April 29, 2010.

At Chirp, Twitter revealed its total registered users – 105,779,710. With this ‘official’ figure, let’s take another stab at estimating total Twitter users in Asia. This is a revised estimates to the previous posting, Twitter in Asia, by Country. The estimates now is based on the ‘official’ total registered Twitter users and Twitter population’s percentage breakdown, by country (source: Sysomos).

During Chirp, co-founder @Biz also revealed that 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com. So, Fred Wilson’s argument that “Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com” seems to apply. However, comScore’s estimate of 60 million unique visitors at Twitter.com may be way off! The use of the 60-million figure in my previous estimates resulted in inflated estimates of Twitter population in Asia.

With the use new official total registered users, the new estimates of total Twitter users in each country are reduced by roughly half (compared to my previous estimates). Maybe now, the estimates are closer to reality.

Asian Countries, by % of Twitter Users and Total Users

105,779,710 users and new estimates of Twitter users in Asia originally appeared on GreyReview on April 20, 2010.

Unconference Singapore is now called echelon. The annual web technology event, organized by the e27 gang, features mind-boggling combination of conference, panel discussions, pitching sessions and exhibitions. This year, topics to be covered include social gaming, cloud computing, location-based services, social networking, social media and socialTV.

Last year, I particularly enjoyed trolling the exhibition area for startups, which featured 30 awesome startups – iTwin and SocialWok – both went on to be featured on TechCrunch50 2009; iTwin, one of TC50 Finalists and SocialWok, winner of Demopit – Malaysian startups (Elevyn and Foldees), and others include Klout, eJamming Audiio, Fame, Orsiso, ThoughtBuzz and PieceHunters. The Startup Pitches session was great too and last year’s featured 8 startups – Countspin (US), iTwin (Singapore), Frenzoo (Hong Kong), Human Network Labs (Singapore), Socialwok (Singapore), Genkii (Japan), among others.

Bigger, Better Unconference SIngapore 2009, a 1-day event; echelon 2010 is going to be a 2-day event and will have 40 speakers, 50 startups, 8 case studies, 6 panel discussions, 4 keynotes! Thought leaders are Dave McClure of Founders Fund, Noah Kagan of Gambit (payment solution for virtual currency), Rex Ng of 6waves (social games publisher), Bernard Leong of Chlkboard (mobile ads delivery system), Yong Ming Guang of Socialwok (business social networking for enterprises), David Zhao of Zumodrive, Gen Kanai of Mozilla, just to name a few.

echelon 2010 will be held at Matrix @Biopolis, Singapore from 01 to 02 June 2010. Book your ticket here.

Enter the Echelon starring cool web startups and thought leaders in Asia. Coming soon originally appeared on GreyReview on April 15, 2010.

Facebook marked its 6th anniversary on February 05 2010 with a population of 400 million users. On February 11 2010, the social network hit another milestone – more than 100 million people actively using Facebook on their mobile phones. Today, there are over 3 billion photos being uploaded to Facebook each month and more than 500,000 active applications on its Platform. And recently, FastCompany magazine named Facebook, as the World’s Most Innovative Company 2010.

These days, 70% of Facebook users are from outside US. In Asia, Facebook is fast becoming the one the region’s leading social networks. Indonesia has the fourth highest number of Facebook users in the world, after US, UK and Turkey. With 18.9 million users, Indonesia is well ahead of Philippines, the country with 10.5 million Facebook users (refer to table below). This is followed by India (6.8 million), Taiwan (5.8 million) and Malaysia (5.1 million). In terms of penetration rate, Hong Kong has the highest “Facebook users per country population” rate in Asia, at 39%, followed by Singapore (38%), Taiwan (25%), Malaysia (18%) and Philippines (11%). The total Facebook users in Asia is 59.6 million, or about 15% of the global Facebook population.

(UPDATE: The % of Facebook Users over Total Online Users to provide a much richer perspective on Facebook use in Asia. Based on the suggestion by Gen Kanai – see his comment below.)

In Asia, the two dominant age groups on Facebook are “18 – 24″ and “25 – 34″ (see Table below). The youthful “18 – 24″ age group is dominant in Indonesia, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In Pakistan, Vietnam and Bangladesh, the age group constituted more than half of the Facebook population in their respective country.

The “25 – 34″ is the dominant age group in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea and interestingly, these are all developed economies. In these developed economies, Facebook users above the age of 25 constitute more than half of the Facebook users population in each respective country. The reverse is true for the developing economies i.e. Indonesia, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where more than half of Facebook population is below the age of 24.

Facebook’s Asian engines of growth: College students in developing countries and working adults/professionals in developed countries. Some possible explanations: (a) youth population in developing nations is far more than the developed ones (in other words, developed nations with relatively aging population), and/or (b) working adults are more web 2.0-savvy in developed economies. What do you think?

All the above figures were extracted from Facebook Advertising page, over a period of two hours on March 01 2010. ¶ @zhiQ

Facebook in Asia: Total Users and Age Groups [Latest STATS] originally appeared on GreyReview on March 2, 2010.

Facebook has acquired Octazen Solutions, a Kuala Lumpur-based maker of Contacts Importer software, reported on GigaOM. Octazen’s software already in-use on Facebook and helps the social networking giant to “grow by making it easy for users to invite their contacts on other services,” such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and others. This ‘old’ PDF document explains a bit more on how the Contacts Importer works.

Octazen Solutions – Contacts Importer Web API

According to the article, Facebook said the acquisition as “talent acquisition”. Octazen’s two employees will join Facebook as engineers and remain in Malaysia (Octazen with an office in Taman Melawati, Kuala Lumpur), making them social network’s first Asia-based full-time employees of Facebook.

Screenshot of the announcement on Octazen Solution’s website:

¶ @zhiQ

UPDATE: For more details, read Michael Arrington’s posting here.

Facebook Acquired A Malaysian Startup originally appeared on GreyReview on February 20, 2010.

According to Sycomos latest report on Twitter, Asian countries constitutes about 7.74% of the Twitter unique users worldwide. Indonesia topped with 2.34% of unique users, followed by Japan (1.47) and India (0.97). On a global perspective, more than half of Twitter unique users (56.59%) are located in the US and followed by UK (8.09), Brazil (6.73), Canada (4.36) and Australia (2.63). This is based on analysis of active 13 million unique users, between Oct 16 2009 and Dec 16 2009.

comScore reported the total global unique users of Twitter.com has reached 60 million. However, Fred Wilson argued that “Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com.” Twitter ecosystem refers to all interactions with Twitter APIs, via the plethora of third-party Twitter apps i.e. Tweetdeck, bit.ly, Facebook, iPhone apps, etc. Wilson went on to summarize:

You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former and that delta is likely to grow even larger.

Let’s assume that Twitter ecosystem is 3-times the size of Twitter.com. With comScore’s 60 million unique visitors worldwide at Twitter.com, the Twitter ecosystem is estimated at 180 million. The total Twitter users across the globe (Twitter.com + Twitter ecosystem) is 240 million!

The table below weaves together Sycomos’ report, comScore’s estimate and Fred Wilson’s Twitter ecosystem. The “% Twitter Users” is derived from Sycomos’ report and the total Twitter users is based on 240 million users worldwide. Indonesia with 5.6 million users, followed by Japan (3.5 million) and India (2.3 million). Malaysia with 6th largest Twitter population in Asia with estimated 1.1 million users (and this is far, far, far more than my previous estimate of Twitter population in Malaysia). And the estimated total Twitter users in Asia is 18.6 million.

Asian Countries, by % of Twitter Users and Total Users

Mashup of figures from different reports to derive estimates potentially lead to inaccurate conclusions (different reports with different sets of assumptions and methodologies). However, Sysocomos’ “% of Twitter users” gives us some ideas on Twitter use across Asia. With the percentage, at least we can derive Twitter population size by country, using the conservative comScore’s 60 million, plus-ecosystem’s 240 million or any other estimates out there. ¶ @zhiQ

UPDATE April 20 2010: See the latest estimates of Twitter users in Asia here.

UPDATE Feb 20 2010: Based on Google, the estimated, unduplicated number of people who visited Twitter.com over a 1-month period:
1. Japan: 9.9 million users
2. Indonesia: 5.1 million
3. India: 4.2 million
4. South Korea: 1.5 million
5. Philippines: 1.3 million
6. Thailand: 910k
7. Malaysia: 910k
8. China: 680k
9. Singapore: 240k

Image from textually.org.

Twitter in Asia: Total Users, by Country originally appeared on GreyReview on January 26, 2010.

A Green Day-esque song played on Hitz.fm radio this morning, titled Through My Window (click to play), with artist name undisclosed but DJ @rudyculously mentioned a website address, EveryoneConnects.net. On the website, there’s not much information except the MP3 file of the song (available for free download), together with the song lyric. Its “What’s the Buzz?” box is displaying Twitter updates stream. Also, there are links to its Twitter, Facebook and Friendster profile pages. And this phrase is seen at the bottom of the page, “Everyone Connects is about getting people to communicate & collaborate because when everyone’s connected, anything is possible.”

Song as teaser, Twitter stream on website and profile pages on social networks – ingredients for brewing a groundswell? At the time of this posting, Twitter, Facebook and Friendster pages are still relatively empty. Search the Whois database and the record shows the domain ‘www.EveryoneConnects.net’ was created on September 29, 2009 and is registered to Monster Interactive Sdn Bhd (the interactive agency for this campaign?).

‘Through My Window’, part of Microsoft Windows 7 campaign? Or is it for a music-centric social networking site? Or is it by a communication/colloration software solution provider? Or is it… Anyway, let your imagination run amok and enter your wild guess in the 1Question Survey form below.

Through My Window, I Can See A Silhouette of A Social Media Campaign originally appeared on GreyReview on October 19, 2009.

According to the latest global Broadband Quality Study, three Asian countries – South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong – are world leaders in providing top quality consumer broadband services.

The Study is conducted by the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics; sponsored by Cisco. To determine the Broadband Quality Score, the researchers analyzed a total of 24 million records sourced from broadband tests using Speedtest.net (Ookla) during May 2008 and May – July 2009

This year, the study covers a total of 66 countries (and 13 are from Asia); additional 24 countries compared to 2008, plus new analysis on broadband quality in more than 240 cities. In terms of Broadband Leadership score, among Asian countries, Malaysia is behind South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan; ahead of China and India.

Asian Countries and Broadband Leadership, Broadband Quality Score and Penetration 2009

In the Broadband Leadership Matrix, Malaysia is placed in between ‘Leap Frog’ group and ‘Catch up’ group.

Malaysia is among the countries with the slowest download speed; only faster than South Africa, Tunisia, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya.

Download Speed, by Country

In terms of Broadband Quality Score, Malaysia is in the ‘Below Today’s Applications Threshold’ category.

Broadband Quality Score, by Country

More about the Broadband Quality Study here.

Malaysian Broadband is ‘Below Today’s Applications Threshold’: Broadband Quality Study 2009 originally appeared on GreyReview on October 2, 2009.

Ian Stewart, Head of Asia, Friendster gave a keynote address at the recent Social Media World Forum Asia in Singapore. From his presentation, we can learn that Friendster is positioning themselves as the social network for youth. That’s why his presentation is packed with data from MTV survey on online activities of young people. Some of his predictions for social networks in 2010 are more focus on teens & tweens, virtual currencies, social shopping, more monetization models and cross platform aggregation (see below for complete list).

He also mentioned Twitter in 2006 is the “last time there has been a significant web application that comes along the social media space and captivated the whole world.” Interesting observation. Anyway, here are audio snippets from his keynote, accompanied by his slides.

Overview of Social Media landscape

What’s Hot, What’s Not

How many friends do you have?

Youth and Social Networks

Age Groups and Social Networks

Web Evolution

Maturing Social Networks

TechCrunch Quote

The Road Ahead for Social Networks

The Shifts

You can view Ian Stewart’s entire presentation slides here.

What’s Now, What’s Next for Social Networking: Ian Stewart, Friendster (with audio clips) originally appeared on GreyReview on September 25, 2009.