Looking at this trend, SingTel is organizing i.Challenge11 – The Tablet Enterprise, a competition to showcase your ideas and applications. The competition is looking for tablet-friendly, enterprise-centric mobile applications that can help businesses in 6 key areas. Be ready to submit your application, prototype or even an idea that falls into the competition categories.

There will be up to 12 finalists will be selected and awarded SGD1,000 and up to 4 winners will walk away with SGD$20,000 for
each winning entry. There is not only SGD100,000 cash prize to be won, but we are also ready to Go-To-Market with
the winning ideas!

Singtel have also lined up 2 training sessions for you to learn from the experts on how you can create the winning app
that will change businesses. Seats are limited and registration is based on first-come-first-served basis. Find out more
from their website at http://six.sg/ichallenge

Accordint to the site,The 6 categories are:

In and Out of Office
In a company, the mobile workforce is always on the move to acquire new accounts and support existing customers. It is difficult to track progresses and manage company resources.

We are looking for innovations that will enhance the experience of going “in and out of office”, more seamless, easy to adopt, and impressive to customers.

Asian Business Traveller
Employees who work in MNCs may have to travel frequently. It has never been easy to manage the cost of staying connected while keeping the productivity level high during these overseas trips.

We are looking for innovations to help the “Asian Business Traveller” increase cost transparency, improve productivity, and make every minute overseas count.

Data Driven Enterprise
Why guess when there’s fact? Companies are increasingly looking to make sense of the deluge of information found online or within the enterprise, so that they can make more informed business decisions.

We are looking for innovations to help the “Data Driven Enterprise”, using data to find new customers, uncover business risks and hone new product features.

The Business Exchange
Engaging your customers, suppliers and partners is limited to the trading hours every day. Can we help businesses stay connected with their counterparts, to build engaging and mutually trusted business relationships?

We are looking for innovations that facilitate “The Business Exchange”, helping companies exchange opportunities, surface and close sales / partnership leads.

Office on the Move
Higher rents in Singapore and globalisation of the work force has created a large number of SOHO companies, where employees can work anywhere that has an Internet connection.

We are looking for innovations to help businesses with “Office on the Move”, that allows employees to collaborate wherever they are.

The Mobile Agent
With the increasing trend in start-ups and entrepreneurs, it is important to stay ahead of competition by looking for interesting ways to engage, sell and support their customers.

We are looking for innovations for the “Mobile Agent”, apps that enable end-to-end capabilities of individuals or teams of independent business owners.

Over the west, mobile marketing has already played an important role. Whereas in Asia, it could be different. During 2008, the minute attention on mobile marketing were centered particularly on text message promotions and in hope it changes over the coming years. As ADMA connects the dots in this region, it shows some good statistics to consider. Here are some highlights of the their findings:

• Internet users in Asia Pacific spent more than 5.6 trillion minutes online in 2009, and bought US$7 billion in virtual goods.
• When it comes to making online purchases, Asians across the board listen closely to their friends. Nearly half (48%) of South Korean internet users said they had bought something in the past because it was either discussed or recommended by one of their online friends, as have 38.2% of Malaysians, 40.4% of Japanese, 42.2% of Vietnamese, 48.4% of Indonesian’s and one third of Filipinos.
• Mobile shopping is taking hold of the region, with nearly eight out of 10 Asian mobile users engaging in some form of mobile shopping activity in the past year.
• The Koreans are the top shoppers, with 97% of internet users say they have shopped online.
• Indians spent the least amount of time online of any Asian nation, at 11 hours per month.
• 63% of Singaporeans online watch TV at the same time.
• Japan leads the pack with mobile social media – more than 75% of social network users only access the sites via their mobiles.
• The Filipinos lead the world in SMS, with two billion text messages sent every day.
• Hong Kong people take the instant message crown, spending twice as much time IM’ing as anyone else in the region.
• More than half the Asia Pacific region’s online population is Chinese, but they are the least prolific users of search in Asia Pacific.
• Australians spend more time on social networking sitesthan anyone else in the world (seven hours a month) and 27% of all Australians blog.

And Junta42 states that mobile content marketing solutions are on the rise, up 63% from 2009 survey figures whilst considering only 10% are currently using mobile content marketing, 2011 should show a dramatic increase in that area.

Trends do show an increase in mobility since 2009 compared to the previous years and we are yet to have better statistics for 2010 to forecast 2011 spending strength. As more Iphone, Ipad, Blackberry and Android are selling in Asia, could it be time for Asian companies to ride on this wave of marketing heavily or dunk it?

According to wikipedia, in 2005, Time magazine included her in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

• Congratulations from the TWIA crew to our fellow co-host Mike Foong & his spouse with their 4th kid Myra Ines Foong – and is she the first child with her own hashtag #babym4 and have her name crowdsourced via twitter?
• Past Events: Open Web Asia & Google Dev Fest in KL – What an exciting week and we have a lot of feedback coming from our live show asking us for a video version. If you have any thoughts, please let us know. We also talked about the Google Dev Fest that followed after Open Web Asia in KL. Also, we reveal the next possible dates & venues for the next Open Web Asia Conferences: Taiwan & Indonesia next year.
• AntennnaGate from Apple & iPad sales furore in SG: So, we skipped this issue relatively quickly and talked about how iPad sales were so fast and furious that Smithy did not manage to get one for himself.
• The story about Bubble Motion: Interesting Asia start-up in Singapore and funded by Sequoia Capital (the same one who funded Google) which have made headway with Bubbly in India.
• Japan tech going regional? : With the launch of an interesting app, Sekai Camera from Japan with none of us installing it, we discussed how Japan has lately focused its efforts towards China & Korea while also being the first destination for US start-ups to launch in Asia.
• The MOL CEO, Ganesh Kumar Bangah and his blunder with his now famous comment on his rival’s OffGamers’ FB page, “Too bad for you, this is social media.“. If you do not know by now, MOL is the company who acquired Friendster and made a deal to distribute Facebook credits in Southeast Asia.
• Upcoming Events: Asian Blogger & Social Media Conference next week, Social Media World Forum Asia & Accelerate by E27 both happening on 22-23 Sep.

TWIA Panel Display Screen (taken by Farry Aprianto and tagged by Mohan Belani in Echelon 2010)

Editor’s Note: The sound quality is perfect after the first few minutes with some calibration from the start. Please bear with us. We will post pictures in this event once we receive them from the organizers.

Singapore, April 14, 2010 – The first day of the Mobile Marketing Association Forum Asia Pacific 2010 (MMAF) brought together some of the world’s largest brand and agencies to discuss the myriad possibilities of engaging consumers via the mobile medium.

Several themes emerged during the course of day one. Speakers expressed positive disposition towards the state of the mobile medium. Rajesh Jain, Founder-Chairman and Managing Director, Emergic Venture Capital Pte Ltd delivered the keynote, where he described the range of mobile channels and outlined some potential new areas for development.

The rest of the speakers took off from that starting point, looking at the tremendous growth in mobile over the last year or so, including the interesting but possibly anecdotal statistic that there are more mobile users (4.5 billion) than there are owners of toothbrushes (4.2 billion).

Speakers also shared different statistics to demonstrate the scope of growth in the mobile industry. There were over 850 million mobile payment transactions by 2009, and by 2020 there will be an estimated 10 billion mobile devices in use, more than one and a half times the population of the planet. More interestingly, when discussing mobile giving, it emerged that over 4 million users had used their mobile devices to donate money to Haiti, which accumulated to 41 million dollars. Different approaches to reaching customers were also discussed, from branded utility to location based advertising.

“The discussion today was very rich – pointing out characteristics of mobile communications, including their always-on nature, and the rich customer profiling that can be done, as well as, ways to use that to deliver marketing messages most effectively to customers,” observed Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director, APAC, Mobile Marketing Association.

The need for accurate metrics was a focal theme, even as Henry Stevens, Director of Media and Entertainment, GSM Association shared their pioneering efforts in the United Kingdom in the area of Mobile Media Metrics. The lack of consolidated standard for measurement didn’t stop growth in the mobile sphere, as several other speakers demonstrated with case studies, both globally and in the region.

Sean Rach, Director, Digital Media & Corporate Events, Prudential Corporation led the brand perspective, pointing out that marketers want relevance, reach, innovation and results and that it was up to the various parties in the mobile economy to demonstrate this. He rallied his colleagues to further collaboration and innovation, calling mobile the marketer’s secret weapon. And other speakers shared case studies from around the world, success stories from other markets, the benefits to be gained from SMS-based advertising efforts, as well demonstrating a couple of new platforms and technologies.

Day two of the event will see another exchange of knowledge revolving around brands and agencies.

About the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is the premier global non-profit trade association established to lead the growth of mobile marketing and its associated technologies. The MMA is an action-oriented organization designed to clear obstacles to market development, establish mobile media guidelines and best practices for sustainable growth, and evangelize the use of the mobile channel. The more than 700 member companies, representing over 40 countries around the globe, include all members of the mobile media ecosystem. The Mobile Marketing Association’s global headquarters are located in the United States and it has regional chapters, including North America (NA), Europe, Latin America (LATAM), Middle East & Africa (MEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC) branches.

In case you missed out, Fusion Garage(FG), a Singaporean company was supposed to partner with Techcrunch to launch their version of the Ipad called the Crunchpad. A few days before the launch, Michael Arrington announced the death of the Crunchpad. What happened after that was FG decided to launch the product by themselves and renaming it the Joojoo.

With an impending case with Techcrunch, FG was taking pre-order and announced they received a new round of investment and a partnership with a South East Asia mobile player. This “major mobile player” is no other than Malaysia’s own CSL group. According to their site, “CSL is a leading and most established mobile phone service company in Malaysia”. CSL group is a retailer, service provider and currently manufacturing mobile devices and netbooks.
Their carry their own range such as the Blueberry and the Nseries netbooks.

With this partnership, CSL will be their manufacturing partner for the Joojoo and we will expect to see the device in the market by end of Feb.

When asked by SgEntrepreneurs on the Ipad, Chandrasekar said with the bigger screen and faster loading time, the Joojoo will be formidable and he thanked for opening up the market as pre-order of the Joojoo pad has increased since the announcement of the Ipad.

We have yet to get any comment from CSL when this article was published.

To find out on some of our thoughts on the Crunchpad Joojoo incident, listen to ThisWeekinAsia Episode 5