This Week in Asia Episode 66: The Worlds of Tencent & Sekai Camera

TWIA producer, Mike Foong is finally back with the crew in the virtual studio after 3 months of hiatus, with also one of our highest recurring special guests, Serkan Toto (@serkantoto) from TechCrunch in Japan to talk about the top news that rocked the web and tech landscape in Asia this week. We discussed a few big hitters in the form of TenCent’s acquisition of Comsenz, the growing popularity of Sekai Camera and Koprol’s TV ad that rocked Indonesia along with other stories that focused on e-commerce in Asia, online forums and the big events in Asia which will have our September and October calendars all filled up.

• NTT Technologies Showcase – Serkan tells us his recent trip to NTT Docomo Labs (article in Japanese).
• Nobot partners with BuzzCity: A Japanese smartphone ad optimizer partners with Singapore mobile ad network, BuzzCity which is focused on mobile ads on WAP/Feature phones. Is BuzzCity heading for smartphone space?
• TenCent acquires Comsenz: TenCent has acquired China’s largest site for online forums. Is this an extension of acquiring traffic, creating new channels of distribution and integrating new service layers with the acquisition? The panel also discuss why online forums still have an appeal in Asia as compared to the dying ones in the West and how they can earn revenues off their online forums.
• China Alibaba buys Auctiva: The flurry of E-Commerce activity is heating up in Asia, with Rakuten in Japan making acquisitions in the US, while Groupon takes Asia clones. Now Alibaba is getting into the game with an acquisition. What lies ahead for Asia’s top tech companies? Is this the beginning of a new era where we start owning US tech companies?
• Sekai Camera on Web: Sekai Camera, a TechCrunch50 company from Japan, has taken the whole Japan by storm with their augmented reality app and sees a new gaming world with social, location based and augmented reality (which they call “solar”). Serkan tells us about the app, Sekai Camera and how they have iterated their technology and acquired a big influx of users into their app.
• Koprol gets 7K users from TV Ad: Similar to what FourSquare did with Bravo in the US, Koprol launched a TV ad in Indonesia and acquired a good amount of users within a day. Is the use of old media still relevant to new high tech social media companies? We also discussed Mixi’s new location based service and also Facebook Places along this issue.
• Events: (a) Geek Camp – 4 Sep 2010, (b) Accelerate – 22-23 Sep 2010, (c) Social Media World Forum Asia – 22-23 Sep 2010, (d) SeedCamp Singapore, (e) Barcamp JB, (f) Barcamp Phnom Penh – 25-26 Sep 2010, and (g) Barcamp Singapore 6 (9-10 Oct 2010) & Barcamp Bangkok (23-24 Oct 2010). One last thing: AsiaJin Meetup in Hackerspace SG (25 Sep 2010).

[powerpress]

This article was first posted at ThisWeekInAsia, a podcast that caters to what’s the hot and interesting news dominating the web and tech landscape in Asia, and a Young Upstarts content syndication partner.