The TMI Holding Corporation from Taiwan has recently announced that they are investing in software-based startups that are also located at the island. The TMI was jointly founded by ITRI, Kaifu Lee, former head of Google China, and the WI Harper Group as the three startups are Citesocial, Driving Curve, and PeerIdea. Citesocial is an online mall focused on design and fine foods. Brands such as Lavie and Braun are some of the higher profile folks on board for the startup. It is also known for promoting the “ostrich pillow” in recent months, which has been… Read More

Any product or business that has anything to do with print is considered a dying business.  Business cards to some people is one of them.  But a Chinese company doesn’t seem to believe in that idea of business cards becoming a dinosaur soon and instead its business is growing because of it.

A company that specializes in business cards, CamCard of Shanghai, boasts 10 million monthly active users, with 50 million registered in total. And half of its sales are outside of China.  This compares to LinkedIn’s Cardmunch, which does about 2 million… Read More

Chute, a Y-Combinator startup that helps publishers and brands incorporate photos and other media onto their own websites, has raised $7 million in Series A Funding.

Chute previously raised a $2.7 million seed.  For this round, it was led by Foundry Group.

Chute is also looking into other photo collection methods, like allowing news reporters to post photos directly from a Chute mobile reporting app.

Chute co-founder Ranvir Gujral, however, said the company wants to build “a complete visual platform.” Basically anytime a company publishes visual content, Chute should… Read More

Neptune, a Montreal, Quebec-based startup, has a smartphone the size of a watch and that can be worn as a watch. The startup says the smartwatch will be powered by Google’s Android software that straps onto your wrist.

The Neptune watch is called the Pine.  Some of the features of Pine include the world's first fully independent smartwatch that can make and receive phone calls,  take pictures, check email, browse the web, and much more; all independently without the presence of a smartphone.

As you may expect, the Neptune smartwatch will be large… Read More

Silicon Valley-based BootstrapLabs, a Silicon Valley-based seed plus venture capital fund that invests in foreign startups to relocate to Silicon Valley and build global companies, and Malaysia-based MAD Incubator yesterday announced the formation of BootstrapAccelerator Asia.

BootstrapAccelerator Asia will become the first Southeast Asia-focused accelerator for tech startups with a Silicon Valley fast track.

BootstrapAccelerator will focus on early-stage capital efficient startups that leverage the speed of internet distribution and the scalability of cloud infrastructure. Selected startups will receive a substantial package of cash grants and other perks valued at over US$35,000. Additionally, the… Read More

Kloudless, a service for moving data to different cloud platforms, launched at Disrupt NY 2013 Monday.

CEO Elliot Sun said in TechCrunch the service offers a plugin that the user installs in Outlook or as an extension through their web browser to use in Gmail or other apps.  He said Kloudless does not store any data or files and the service sits in the middle, acting as a pipeline.

Kloudless is a “message bus” for the cloud. The message bus is a middleware event-based system where every request, goes through the message… Read More

Japanese startup Gengo, a popular online translation service, announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round. The funding was led by Intel Capital, Iris Capital, Infocomm, NTT-IP and Saudi Telecom Ventures, and Atomico.  Gengo’s previous round raised a total of $6.8 million, led by Atomico and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. McClure is also a Gengo board member.

“The Gengo team is excited about working with investors from Asia, the USA, Europe, and the Middle East, led by Intel Capital, because of their global experience and… Read More

Little Eye Labs, a startup out of India’s GSF Accelerator, is providing app crash testing service before developers go into post-production. The service was launched a few weeks ago.

The service allows developers to monitor an app’s performance on a single or multiple devices, from memory usage, to power and wireless data during a test-run.

There are two ways to do the testing.  One way is to plug the phone in a computer and watch how it performs.  The second way is to through Little Eye Lab’s software by letting the app… Read More

First Financial Daily (link via Google Translate) has reported that Baidu, Hillhouse Capital, and GGV Capital have invested a total of $57 million in Chinese travel site Qunar.  Baidu so far has not commented on the First Financial Daily report.

Baidu and GGV Capital are already investors in Qunar.  GGV first invested in Qunar in November 2009 when it led an investment round of $15 million. In July 2011, Baidu became a majority shareholder in Qunar when it invested $306 million. Back then Qunar was valued at about $483 million, according to First… Read More

A MIT Media Lab startup claims it has the cracked the code on text mining.  The startup is Luminoso, which is officially launching this month claims its technology analyzing text on the Internet in order to mine such relationships is a quantum leap over competitors like Lexalytics, Crimson Hexagon and Clarabridge.

Luminoso’s technology is based on 14 years of research at MIT that applies artificial intelligence, probability and a database of 17 million facts, many of which is taken from Wikipedia, to apply common sense knowledge to text mining. Some of… Read More