• 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