Singapore's air pollution rises to unhealthy level

(GNN) - Singapore's air pollution hit levels classified "unhealthy" on Friday, the government's National Environment Agency said on its website. (www.haze.gov.sg)

The 3-hour Pollution Standards Index (PSI) in the city-state rose to 102 at 4 p.m. local time (0800 GMT). A PSI reading above 100 indicates air pollution has reached an "unhealthy" level.

The PSI level in the island-nation hit a record-high of 401 in June 2013, when smoke from forest burning in Indonesia engulfed the city.

(Reuters)(Reporting By Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Himani Sarkar)

Rocket Internet-Backed Car Listings Site Carmudi Raises $25M To Fuel Growth In Asia And Mexico

(GNN) - Carmudi, a car classifieds site that focuses on emerging markets, announced today that it has raised $25 million to gear up its operations in Mexico and several Asian countries. This round, Carmudi’s second, includes Asia Pacific Internet Group (a joint venture between Rocket Internet and Ooredoo), Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures, as well as an undisclosed private investor.

This brings the total Carmudi has raised so far to $35 million. Its last funding round was in April 2014. The company, which was founded in 2013 and now operates in 20 countries, will use the funds to expand in seven Asian markets (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam) as well as Mexico.

The company’s other markets are spread throughout Africa and the Middle East and include Cameroon, Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Tanzania, the United Arab Emirates, and Zambia.

Carmudi co-founder and global managing director Stefan Haubold says that the company plans to add more countries to its roster, but hasn’t decided which ones yet. Its latest round will be used to invest in product technology, in particular making its mobile app easier to use, and scaling up operations in Asia and Mexico.

The site currently has a total of 300,000 listings for vehicles worldwide, and claims five million users a month. Carmudi’s Android apps were rolled out last year, and it launched a iOS version earlier this month.
Carmudi’s mobile apps have been downloaded 300,000 times so far. In total, mobile visits now account for about 60 percent to 70 percent of its total traffic, which is important because the company is targeting markets where many users access the Internet primarily through smartphones or tablets.

Haubold claims that Carmudi is now the top car classifieds site in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. In Asia, alternatives to Carmudi’s service include local car listings and classifieds sites in each market.

Haubold says his company differentiates through its mobile apps, which let buyers upload photos and descriptions of their cars; services like loan calculators; and inventory sweeps that clear out listings after a certain length of time (60 days for most listings and 45 for ones placed by dealerships) so buyers see fresh inventory.

In some Southeast Asia markets, Carmudi’s rivals include iCar Asia, which grew last year by making acquisitions of smaller car classified sites in Thailand and Indonesia. Haubold does not consider iCar Asia a competitor, however, because Carmudi has newer listings and operates in markets that do not overlap with iCar Asia.

Carmudi monetizes through listing fees, but is currently focused on expansion and growth, says Haubold.
Rocket Internet has been busy building a network of e-commerce services and marketplaces throughout Southeast Asia, including many (real estate classifieds platform Lamudi, price comparison site Pricepanda, and car-calling app Easy Taxi) included in the Asia Pacific Internet Group’s portfolio. This creates online and offline (in the case of logistics) networks that may eventually help each individual startup scale up faster.

Singtel, Sony And Warner’s New Video Streaming Service Beats Netflix To Asia

(AsiaTimes.ga) Telecom giant Singtel is planning to beat Netflix to the punch in Asia after it announced it has partnered with Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers to introduce a video streaming service in the region.

The companies said that HOOQ — which is described as a “joint venture startup” — will offer Hollywood movies and U.S. TV shows alongside domestic content from India, China, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Korea and Japan. In total, HOOQ will begin with an initial catalog of over 10,000 shows and movies.

There’s no specific launch date, but Singtel said the service will go online in the first quarter of 2015, initially in Indonesia, Philippines, India and Thailand. From there, the telecom giant is promising a ‘progressive rollout’ to other countries where it has business — other Singtel markets include Singapore, and Australia.

Also lacking from the initial announcement is an indication of price, but — interestingly — it looks like customers won’t be limited to paying via credit cards, as is the case with Netflix. Singtel said it will use its “billing capabilities” in countries where credit card ownership remains low, so that may mean customers can pay as part of their post-pay contract, and perhaps even using prepaid credit.

The timing of the launch is interesting because Netflix has not arrived in Asia Pacific yet. The U.S. company is preparing to launch in Australia and New Zealand sometime this year, after which it is likely to foray into Asian markets, so HOOQ will almost certainly be first in many parts of the region. You could see that as a first mover advantage, or a move that is good for the industry in general because it raises awareness of OTT video services in nascent markets.

Nonetheless, Peter Bithos, the CEO of HOOQ, believes that there is an immediate demand for Netflix-like video streaming services in Asia.

“We are starting this venture to change the way people across Asia view entertainment. Today, across developing markets, there is limited access to quality entertainment, streamed directly to the screen of one’s choice. It’s either illegal, high cost or difficult to get. We aim to fix that,” he said in a statement.

Piracy and lack of awareness are often cited as major barriers for licensed streaming services in Asia but, with two content companies and one telco on board, HOOQ is no bootstrapped startup. It could use Singtel’s network of operators — which reach a total subscriber base of over 500 million customers — and vast resources to gain traction from the get-go.

No doubt we’ll be hearing more updates from HOOQ very soon.

Featured Image: Marc Bruxelle/Shutterstock

Search teams battle rough weather in hunt for AirAsia wreck

GNN - Ships and aircraft criss-crossed the seas off Borneo on Friday hunting for the wreck of an Indonesia AirAsia passenger jet, but bad weather again hindered the search for the plane and the black box flight recorders that should reveal why it crashed.

An official said 30 bodies had been recovered, along with pieces of the broken-up plane, in the Indonesian-led search for Flight QZ8501 that is concentrated on 1,575 square nautical miles of the northern Java Sea.

Strong winds and heavy seas have stopped divers from looking for the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which plunged into the water on Sunday while en route from Indonesia's second-biggest city Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board.

"Waves were between 3 and 4 meters today, making it difficult to load bodies onto ships and between ships," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, told reporters in Jakarta, adding that some vessels would search through the night.

"Tonight we are sending tug boats which should make the (body) transfers easier."

He said two of the 30 bodies found were strapped to their plane seats.

The multinational search operation based in Pangkalan Bun, the town in southern Borneo closest to the search area, was bolstered on Friday by experts from France's BEA accident investigation agency, which attends all Airbus crashes.

Officials said the French team's hydrophones - sophisticated underwater acoustic detection devices - and towed sonar equipment brought by other international experts could not be used on Friday because of high waves.

But naval vessels from Indonesia, the United States and Singapore with in-built anti-submarine capabilities were using sonar to sweep the sea floor.

STALL THEORY
The cause of the crash, the first suffered by the AirAsia group since the budget operator began flying in 2002, is unexplained. Investigators are working on a theory that the plane stalled as it climbed steeply to avoid a storm about 40 minutes into a flight that should have lasted two hours.

Officials earlier said it may take up to a week to find the black boxes, which investigators hope will unravel the sequence of events in the cockpit during the doomed jet's final minutes.

"After the black box is found, we are able to issue a preliminary report in one month," said Toos Sanitioso, an investigator with the National Committee for Transportation Safety. "We cannot yet speculate what caused the crash."

Even in bad weather, the search for the AirAsia plane is less technically challenging than the two-year search for an Air France jet that crashed into deep Atlantic waters in 2009, or the fruitless hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 that disappeared last year.

Given Flight QZ8501 crashed in shallow seas, experts say finding the boxes should not be difficult if its locator beacons, with a range of 2,000 to 3,000 meters (6,560 to 9,800 ft) and a battery life of about 30 days, are working.

Bodies plucked from the sea are being taken in numbered coffins to Surabaya, where relatives of the victims, most of whom were Indonesian, have gathered. Authorities have been collecting DNA from relatives to help identify the bodies.

The first funeral of one of the crash victims was held on Thursday, and on Friday officials said the remains of three more had been identified, including a flight attendant.

AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes tweeted that he would accompany the body of one victim home from Surabaya.

"I'm arriving in Surabaya to take Nisa home to Palembang," he wrote. "I cannot describe how I feel. There are no words."

"UNBELIEVABLY" STEEP CLIMB
The plane was traveling at 32,000 ft (9,753 meters) and the pilots had asked to climb to 38,000 ft to avoid bad weather just before contact was lost. When air traffic controllers granted permission to fly at 34,000 ft a few minutes later, they got no response.

A source close to the investigation said radar data appeared to show the aircraft made an "unbelievably" steep climb before it crashed, possibly pushing it beyond the A320's limits.

Hadi Mustofa Djuraid, a Transport Ministry official, told reporters that authorities were investigating the possibility that the pilot did not ask for a weather report from the meteorological agency at the time of takeoff.

He added that pilots were required to do so before flying.

Indonesia AirAsia's president director, Sunu Widyatmoko, said in a text message: "We will make a release shortly" on that aspect of the investigation.

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours on the A320 and the plane last underwent maintenance in mid-November, according to Indonesia AirAsia, 49 percent owned by Malaysia-based AirAsia.

Three airline disasters involving Malaysian-affiliated planes in under a year have spooked travelers.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew and has not been found. On July 17, the same airline's Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The co-pilot was French.

(Additional reporting by Cindy Silviana, Kanupriya Kapoor, Michael Taylor, Adriana Nina Kusuma, Charlotte Greenfield, Nilufar Rizki, Nicholas Owen in JAKARTA, Jane Wardell in SYDNEY and Anshuman Daga in SINGAPORE; Writing by Jane Wardell and Alex Richardson; Editing by Michael Perry, Paul Tait, Robert Birsel, Mike Collett-White)

(Reuters) (GNN-AIP)

Twitter User Growth Will Come From Asia-Pacific – Region Accounting For 40% Of Users By 2018

Figures out this morning from eMarketer estimate Twitter’s growth to continue in the double-digits through 2018, with the Asia-Pacific region playing a large part in that growth trend. Today, Twitter users in Asia-Pacific already outnumber those in North America and Western Europe, accounting for 32.8% of all Twitter users, compared with just 23.7% in North America, the report says. By 2018, the Asia-Pacific region will account for over a 40% share of Twitter’s user base, while the North American region drops to just 19%.

Also notable is that eMarketer’s report doesn’t include China in its estimates, because the network is currently blocked there, even though many users still access it by way of virtual private networks. If that situation changes, the report notes somewhat obviously, the growth in the Asia-Pacific region would be “significantly higher.”

Instead, the forecast estimates that Indonesia and India will end up impacting Twitter’s user base growth most heavily going forward, with both countries experiencing increases of over 50% in 2014 – the former with 61.7% user growth and the latter with 56.9% growth. More importantly, perhaps, is that while large growth numbers tend to indicate a relatively small installed base, that’s not the case with these two countries – India and Indonesia will become the third and fourth-largest regional Twitter user bases this year, at 18.1 million and 15.3 million users, respectively.

That means this year they will both also surpass the U.K. for the first time, in terms of user numbers.

Meanwhile, in Twitter’s home base in the U.S., the market is more mature, with growth tapering off into the single digits in 2015 and beyond. It will, however, remain the largest country in terms of user accounts throughout the forecasting period. In addition, the U.S. user base is today where most of Twitter’s revenue comes from – in fact, the U.S. accounted for nearly three-quarters of Twitter’s total ad dollars last year.

But this (fairly bullish) report indicates that Twitter still has room to grow its ad business outside the U.S. where the service takes hold in these expanding, emerging markets.

In 2018, eMarketer says it estimates that Twitter will growth 10.7% to reach close to 400 million users worldwide.

One big caveat: this estimate and the forecast itself relies on different data sources than Twitter’s own reported figures (255 million monthly actives, currently) because eMarketer uses instead some 90-plus data sources including Twitter press releases, survey and traffic data from other research firms and regulatory agencies, historical trends, internet and mobile adoption trends, country-specific demographic and socioeconomic factors in its analysis.

From this collection of roughly 400 data points, the firm leans heavily on consumer survey data to eliminate business accounts, multiple accounts for individual users and other sources for double-counting to reach its numbers. This is also eMarketer’s first-ever forecast of Twitter users worldwide, so the company still needs to prove that its estimates on this particular subject do well.