Web 2.0 in SEA

Fupei is social networking site from Indonesia and it is focused on its social-networking capabilities among the country’s Internet users and its member-based friends network.

Its wide social-networking features cover basically all kinds of activities you will expect in a social networking website and they include members, blogs, chat, events, games, photos, videos, music, ecards, themes. It also has its own browser toolbar which is created and served by Conduit.

Basing on Alexa’s data statistics, Fupei’s current members base is almost entirely its own countrymen. This somehow is expected as some of the pages in the website are written in its own country language. Indonesia with a population of 237,512,355 and 20,000,000 Internet users (8.4% of the population) as of May/07 has a healthy no. of internet users for a small local website like Fupei.

After you bought something, do you want to inform the whole world about it and anyone to post their comments on your purchase? If yes, then Shoplette is for you. 

Shoplette wants to create a community where shoppers post their purchases and where the purchase was made e.g. which shopping malls in which country. Users in the website interacts by posting comments on others’ purchases. Posts can also be done using MMS by mobile phones. Google Maps are used to show the location of the places where its users’ did their shoppings.  Copying a page from Twitter, users can follow another user or be followed.

Shoplette is built by Mobrick and as informed by the website, its founders are Shannon Low and Marcus Lim. Both are ex-workers for Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore and my guess they are embarking on their own business in the web industry.

Hope to see more products and websites from this 2-man team in the near future!

Link to article in ZDNet Asia

Sun Microsystems is the next big IT company trying to work closely with the Singapore government to explore the potential of Web 2.0 applications in areas of their daily running of operations. The government body here is the Singapore National Healthcare group. As reported in the article, there is a competition by Sun and the Singapore Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) recently called Java Jive Regional Challenge 2008 to build Web 2.0 mashups targeted at the healthcare industry.

Below are applications what I will like out of this competition and used in the hospitals (you can also called it a wish-list):

• Search - A centralized repository of the patients’ medical records from different sources e.g. hospitals, private clinics, patient’s personal updates, pharmacy’s purchases
• Social networking - A community where doctors and patients interact. Patients can ask pose health-care questions to doctors and any doctor can reply. Patients will store their medical history in their profile e.g. allergies, medications, so that the doctors can give correct and relevant analysis to the questions.
• Mash-ups
  • Google map + database of hospitals, clinics and pharmacies. The application will show the patient on the Google map, the places nearest to his current location, where he can seek a certain type of medical consultation or treatment, or buy a certain kind of medication
  • Flickr + youTube + Twitter. The application shares information on records of x-ray (photos), videos of operations (video) and online discussions (twitter feeds) between the doctors and patients. The information is shown as a timeline to the patients’ medical history so the progress can be tracked

An article at ZDNetAsia TechGuides writing about why SMBs in Asia should have Web 2.0 tools in their websites and business.

Some tips on how SMBs can join in the fun:

•  Identify your SMB’s business needs to adopt Web 2.0 applications.
•  Start small and light.
•  Encourage open communication, and allow user behavior to evolve.
•  Monitor wikis and avoid inactive wiki pages.
•  Train employees to blog responsibly.

Rednano is a Singapore-focus search engine owned by the Singapore Press Holdings. And like it is afraid people does not know, the title of the Rednano website explicitly states it as “Rednano - Singapore Press Holdings Search Engine”. This title has to change as it is giving me the impression it is searching content from Singapore Press Holdings.

Rednano is touted as returning results which are most relevant and most related to Singapore at the top. The results are grouped under categories such as web, news, images, directory, people and maps. I see their direct competitor as Google Singapore so I did a search at both sites and below are the screenshots on the search results in the first page. I am searching for ‘Singapore Idol’ so for Rednano, I only used ‘idol’ for the keyword as it should return the ‘Singapore idol’-related results based on its function. For Google, I selected the ‘pages from Singapore’ option and also used only the ‘idol’ keyword.

For the Rednano search results, the first result is The Unofficial Singapore Idol Blog while for Google, it is Singapore Idol™ 2006. The Singapore Idol 2006 website was not in the first page of Rednano results. To me, I will say Google gave me the better results. And why not as they are the pioneer in search engines so they will have the most comprehensive index of websites in the Internet. In saying so, any newcomer to the search engines do have an uphill task to catch up with Google or Yahoo.

But will the users care? They will pick who can give them the best results now and use it.