Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Startup Asia Chase Is On!


Following the venture trail, the journey has led from Silicon Valley to China and then on to India and Vietnam – and next, newly emerging markets such as Russia and Brazil, which are both angling to build their own Sand Hill Road ecosystem.

Just as Silicon Valley and China had their successes in online travel, e-book retailing, gaming and social networking, the next frontier tech zones are following their example. I wrote Startup Asia to track their progress.

Everyone knows China’s breakthrough Internet companies: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Ctrip, DangDang, Renren. But they don’t yet know their counterparts in India, which is fast on the rise. Nor do they know their look-alikes in Vietnam, Russia or Brazil.

But count on these copycat models to break through in the world’s next hotspots. Why be so sure? Because if the business model works well in one market and can be adapted locally to another culture and language, then why not?  If that new market has a switched-on digital populace, it’s almost foolproof – particularly if the same venture capital firm is behind them, which they are in most cases.

See venture capitalists (above) who spoke at our recent Startup Asia event: Kabir Misra, Kumar Shiralagi, Naren Gupta, Bill Tai, Tim Chang, Peter Wagner.

Keep reading at my Forbes.com column. Click:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2012/01/31/the-startup-asia-chase-is-on/

Monday, January 30, 2012

Silicon Dragon Lady on DingDing.TV



To ring in the Year of the Dragon, I recently appeared on web TV with Diana Ding, the founder and host of DingDing.TV on her talk show Innovation Dialog. See clip from show, Silicon Dragon Lady.

Diana is a terrific interviewer and she managed to get more comments out of me than most do. (Guess folks are curious about how a girl from smalltown Ohio could end up as a journalist and book author writing about startups in Asia.) See Startup Asia and Silicon Dragon. Those in the studio audience also had an opportunity to ask so many pertinent questions that I was under the mistaken impression that they were cued up in advance.

The show was aired live on several Bay Area stations just ahead of the State of the Union address by President Obama, so I'm not sure how many folks listened in. But the beauty of the web is that viewers can tune in later on. The show will be accessible for a month afterwards its original date, January 26, 2011.