HTC’s upcoming mid-range smartphone Desire 620 leaked online

HTC is reportedly preparing a successor to its Desire 610 smartphone in the form of Desire 620. The smartphone was first spotted at Taiwan’s telecom regulator NCC and has now appeared in full “hands on” report by a Bulgarian blog Nixanbal (the report has been deleted for some unknown reason, however it still can be seen in Google Cache).

According to the Nixanbal, the smartphone will feature a 5-inch 720p HD display, 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 64-bit quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and Android 4.4.4. The Desire 620 will also come with 8MP rear camera with LED flash, 5MP front camera, 8GB of on-board storage, microSD card slot and 2100 mAh battery.

In addition, the smartphone sports front-facing speakers and a plastic body. As you can see, overall there are only marginal improvements in the Desire 620 over 610, nothing major, probably in a quick effort to make it ready for 2015.

The new smartphone is said to be coming to Europe in January and will retail around 255 euros. There is no word on the release in other continents but we hope to hear more at the time of the official announcement.

CocCoc, Vietnam’s own breakneck browser, threatens to overcome Google and is now available for..

If you’ve been following our coverage of Vietnam’s search engine market, you’ll remember CocCoc. It’s a Russian-funded but Vietnam-based search engine company that pivoted its focus last year to focus on its browser. Although the company arguably has much better location data, as evidenced by its Google Maps competitor app, Nha Nha, it is still unclear how well the search engine has been doing. I think Google has just been too strong a competitor to match on that front.

CocCoc launched its titular browser in April 2013. But that version was only for Windows PCs. I don’t blame them. Vietnam’s market is dominated by PCs and according to CocCoc’s own data, Mac users only make up 0.6 percent of its current search engine traffic. This was probably a wise choice, according to the CEO of CocCoc, Victor Lavrenko,since the browser is now number two in the market, just behind Chrome and ahead of Firefox. Just this week, CocCoc launched its new Mac browser, to target the small but high-end market in Vietnam.

Although numbers are always hard to track, it’s clear that entering the browser market was the right choice for CocCoc. In September, Lavrenko reported that the browser had helped grow CocCoc, the search site, to 5.2 million daily visitors. From the same ComScore report, Google was at 5.7 million daily visitors. If the growth rate continues, CocCoc may be on a path to surpass Google in Vietnam.

From a product perspective, this is not surprising. For Vietnamese users, the CocCoc browser has several killer features that blow Chrome, Firefox, and Safari out of the water. It allows for automatic diacritics (making it easier for Vietnamese people to type), automatically works around the unofficial Vietnamese Facebook block, and makes downloading from sites like YouTube and other local entertainment and media sites easy. The same is true of CocCoc’s search engine, which handles the Vietnamese language better than Google (although it’s debatable how significant that difference is). These small feature tweaks have contributed significantly to CocCoc’s steady success.

Keep in mind that the CocCoc browser (Mac and PC versions) is actually built on top of Chromium, Google’s open source project for its browser Chrome. Therefore, CocCoc is basically leveraging code from Google. Use Google to beat Google. Ironic, indeed.

If all these numbers do end up checking out, it’s quite clear that Google will not take this lying down. The Google team dedicated to Vietnam is the largest one based in Singapore and is known locally to take a hands-on approach to the Vietnamese market.

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Bareksa wants to make online trading more transparent in Indonesia

Karaniya Dharmasaputra, founder and president director of Bareksa.com


Karaniya Dharmasaputra entered the spotlight at our Startup Arena pitching battle in Jakarta to educate the judges and audience about how his company Bareksa, a portal for trading stocks and bonds in Indonesia, can disrupt the archipelago’s investment game. Dharmasaputra calls Bareksa “Indonesia’s Bloomberg for beginners.”

While other sites like Infovesta and Indonesia-Investments publish news and content related to smart spending on commercial ventures, and Indo Premier serves as an actual portal for online trading, Bareksa offers all the tools that experienced investors and beginners need to make informed trading decisions. More importantly, however, Bareksa also provides the trading platform itself.

Bareksa also features a learning center that is complete with a glossary of otherwise tricky investor lingo and an index of listed companies that are already open for investment. On similar platforms like Bloomberg, just over 30 of the nation’s largest companies are trading. Bareksa already features more than 700 listed local companies that are locked and loaded for public trading.

“Our mission is to make the financial market more transparent in Indonesia,” says Dharmasaputra. He is no stranger to delivering the facts. In 2008, he founded the now gargantuan Indonesian news portal VIVA and is a former managing editor at Tempo news magazine. He is also a recipient of the Bung Hatta Anti-Corruption Award and founder of the Public Policy Institute at Paramadina University.

See: Stockbit, a social network for Indonesian traders​

Is Indonesia ready for its own Bloomberg for beginners?


The judges had some tough questions for Dharmasaputra. Stefan Jung from Monk’s Hill Ventures stressed the importance of building communities around a product in Southeast Asia, and wondered how Dharmasaputra would build Bareksa’s user base. Jayesh of Jungle Ventures was concerned Dharmasaputra might not be thinking long term enough about the future of Bareksa and how to scale it. Willson Cuaca of East Ventures asked about Bareksa’s competition and Jung was wondering why Bareksa was more interested in strategic partners than VC money. Dharmasaputra fielded the questions in a timely manner and exited the stage, hearing a round of applause.




This is part of the coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2014, our event running on November 26 and 27. Check out all the Startup Arena pitches here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia and on our Facebook page.

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Hugo Barra talks about Xiaomi’s progress in Indonesia and India

Hugo Barra from Xiaomi joins us on stage this afternoon at Startup Asia Jakarta 2014 to talk about Xiaomi and its progress in Indonesia.

He says Xiaomi was “clearly world-standard” when he was considering making the move away from Google’s Android team last year, and he’d been following its progress even before that because of early links between Google and Xiaomi’s founders.

“We want to be part of everything that Google does – we want to be early adopters,” says Barra to interviewer Jeremy Wagstaff from Thompson Reuters.

Before discussing Indonesia, the chat turns toward India. Barra says “the community has really embraced us” in India, and the brand now has a number of fans – “Mi Fans” – in the country. Yesterday they had an informal, ad hoc meetup that nearly 70 people came to in a restaurant in Mumbai. He adds that Xiaomi is seeing the same kind of reception in Indonesia.

Xiaomi’s global VP says the brand gets a lot of feedback from users of Xiaomi phones and the MIUI OS in new markets. He adds that they listen too. Even if they get an angry or upset email, he says the user is often pleased and surprised to get a human response straight from Xiaomi. It’s seeing “higher emotion volume than even in China” among fans in India and Indonesia, he states. Those fans are “open, transparent, and sincere,” he adds.

Offline flash sales




Barra said that Xiaomi will do offline sales soon in India – sort of. The plan is to do what he calls offline flash sales (mirroring its online sales system) in India for the Redmi 4G. That will be done in partnership with Airtel. Look out for that early next month.

There will be more offline sales in Indonesia, such as the store-based sales done by local partner Erajaya. He reveals Xiaomi once sold 2,000 phones in one day in offline sales in just two stores.

Fewer than five percent of phones sold in Indonesia are sold online, he states, so there are challenges to being focused on ecommerce. “Perhaps we can be a driver” of ecommerce, he says.

He went on to explain that Xiaomi wants to work very closely with the tech ecosystems in India and Indonesia in terms of startups, apps, and services. There are no deals sorted out yet, but he will talk a lot with startups to cook up something. An example from China is the way Xiaomi created the MiBand in partnership with a Chinese startup.

“It makes perfect sense to build in Indonesia,” he says – but that’s advice for hardware startups, not a statement related to Xiaomi. “I have high hopes for manufacturing in Indonesia,” he adds, and Barra advises local startups to get a Raspberry Pi and start iterating hardware in the same way they do with software.

See: Xiaomi postpones new country launches until 2015

Privacy kerfuffle


“We can’t serve everything from China,” he says, due to issues like high latency and time-outs. That’s why Xiaomi opened a data center in Singapore and the US, and might do the same for India.

If “one of the indirect benefits of this move” is that non-China customers feel safer about privacy (avoiding the grasp of China’s government), then that’s a bonus, he explains. That’s a reference to the fears over Xiaomi’s online messaging service sending back data to China, which prompted the company to make the service an optional feature for people outside China.

Xiaomi currently sells phones in six countries aside from its home in China.

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Sennheiser Introduces New Stores In The US

It seems that what was once temporary is now made permanent – at least until December 28th this year, with premium audio brand Sennheiser having opened up their temporary stores. These experiential stores will boast of an audiovisual design concept that is rather novel, and customers are invited so that they can enjoy the pleasures of excellent sound. These stores will be based in the trend-setting neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side and San Francisco’s Mission District.

Functioning as an urban hub, the stores will welcome customers to actually spend as much time as possible there, so that they are able to experience the full quality of Sennheiser’s headphones as one connects their very own devices, and they can also opt to play music from curated playlists. Apart from that, a top notch audio experience will also be accompanied by palatable treats, with refreshment drinks from IZZE and Runa around.

The Sennheiser headphones have been strategically placed on illuminated ‘sound towers’ that form a visual ‘sound wave’ of light, and this will echo the urban environment as well as reflect the cityscape in an abstracted form which extends over the whole space. Individual stores will feature a DJ booth and gaming area, while there is also an interactive window installation by Nanika that visualizes the city’s ambient noise based on passing traffic and customer’s claps.

Filed in Audio. Read more about sennheiser.

Global Web Index: Tumblr Is Fastest Growing Social Network

Size does matter, and Facebook with its 1.35 billion monthly users happens to be the largest social network in the world – and looks set to remain so for some time to come, but there is the very real “danger” of the figure having arrived at a saturation point. In Global Web Index’s most recent report, it has stated that Tumblr is the fastest growing social network at the moment, with it boasting of a growth rate of 120% in the past 6 months alone. In comparison, Facebook grew by a mere 2%.

Which are the other social networks that remain behind Tumblr? Both Pinterest and Instagram trail not too far away, where the number of active users saw a 6 month increase of 111% and 64%, respectively. It is also interesting to see that all the rest of the major social networks in the market exhibited a superior growth rate compared to Facebook. For instance, LinkedIn saw a 54% growth, Twitter at 26%, YouTube pegged slightly less at 25%, and Google+ at 16%. This is more or less expected to happen, especially when you are a huge behemoth like Facebook, your growth will no longer be exponential, but rather, in a gradual manner. After all, no company can continue to experience exponential growth all the time.

Filed in Cellphones >Computers. Read more about social network and tumblr.

Gionee Elife S5.1: The Full Review

Gionee Elife S5.1: The Full Review

A review of the new Gionee Elife S5.1, reportedly the thinnest smartphone in the world. www.mobilegeeks.com. The Elife 5.1 is a 4.8 inch smartphone that is a...

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