2010 by and large was a good, if not a great year, for the startup scene in Southeast Asia. Compared to previous years, there has been a surge of new startups and funding options. 2010 also witnessed increase in the acquisitions and funding numbers, and an uptake of interest in building new products and businesses.
We have seen this transition taking place and have done the best to report it, as and when it happened. To recap the important stories in 2010, here are the top 5 most read posts in 2010 in a nutshell.
- Asia’s Top 50 apps: In Aug 2010, we launched a competition to discover Asia’s Top 50 apps in conjunction with SingTel’s Accelerate 2010 event. This first of its kind competition in Asia, almost caused our servers to crash and had people voting in large numbers for their favorite app. e27 readers nominated and selected the top 50 apps and a selected panel of judges then selected the top 10 apps from this list. This helped to shine the spotlight on the popular and innovative products from Asia.
- Joojoo is dead: The legal tussle between Singapore-based FusionGarage and TechCrunch may not have come to an end, but the product definitely did. In an interview with e27, FusionGarage’s CEO Chandrashekhar declared the end of Joojoo tablet, and added that the company will now be focusing on producing tablet devices for specific industry verticals.
- Groupon clones in Singapore: Groupon was one of the big stories of 2010. With Google and Facebook eyeing their share of the daily deals pie, Groupon has been steadily expanding to many countries, snapping up the local daily deal sites. We covered the cropping up of daily deal sites in Singapore in mid-2010 and few months later, Groupon announced acquisition of three startups in Southeast Asia including Singapore-based Beeconomic.
- Indonesia’s largest community: Indonesia has been in the tech news radar due to the rising power of its Internet populace and for ranking among the top 5 markets for Facebook and Twitter. But more than Facebook or Twitter, it was the story of Kaskus that caught the maximum attention. This Indonesia-based company that started off as an online forum now enjoys the status of largest community portal in Indonesia with its own payment system and e-commerce platform.
- Milestone in Singapore startup ecosystem: 2010 started off with a big bang, with the announcement of seven new startup incubators in Singapore under the National Research Foundation’s(NRF) Technology Incubation Scheme. As part of this scheme, NRF will be co-investing along with the incubators in Singapore startups. Some of the startups that have been funded under this scheme are Foound, Socialutions, Artyii, ShoppingLifestyle and Socialco. This scheme led to an increase in the influx of startups and investors from various countries to Singapore.
While these changes happened in the startup world, e27 has been going through some changes as well.
- Revamped Website: We launched e27′s new look with better navigation and tighter integration with our social media channels.
- New writers on board: Joon Ian (Chief Editor), Aulia Masna(Managing Editor) and John Lim (Contributing Editor) have now joined on board to expand and deepen our coverage of technology space in South East Asia
- echelon 2010: One of the largest startup events in Asia, this two-day conference saw 650 attendees and 50 startups from 10 Asian countries.
What’s in store for 2011?
We hope to hear more stories on funding, profitability, acquisitions and exciting products in the web and mobile space. Also, stay tuned for updates on echelon 2011! :)
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