Founded by two 26-year-olds R. Chandrasekar and Sam Hon, Velvet Puffin is an “always-on” service that seeks to bring together a seamless social networking and media (video, blogs, photos) sharing between the mobile ohone and your desktop computer.

The startup has received $10 million funding in cash-rich Singapore looking for our own Youtubes and Skypes. The Economic Development Board (EDB) is a public investor along with other private institutions. Such a large sum of money certainly raised eyebrows for a service which has no significant user base and is only launching its public beta today.

What is promising though might be in the intellectual property of Radixs, the parent company of Velvet Puffin. Radixs, in a press release in 2004, released information of their success in building the world’s first universal mobile operating system. This will greatly enhance the compatibility of mobile services across different handsets from the various mobile phone makers. The inter-operability of the mobile service with web-based standards might pave the way for what the Velvet Puffin team touts as “a truly always-on service” across the 2 important screens of the digital revolution.

A review of the startup is available on the Entrepreneur27 site, on Techcrunch and also on Business Times.

Currently in closed beta testing, HiPiHi has generated some interest on Second Life Insider and debates on whether this will take off in China.

Some key observations (the entire site is written in Chinese, so i play translator here):

• Hipihi was founded way back in October 2005 in Zhongkuanchun, Beijing. Second Life took a long time to be developed too before its launch.
• The founders are mainly Xu Hui and Rao XueWei.
• The founders are guys but everything else in their marketing, including their promo video here, appears to target the female crowd.
• The whole site and virtual world uses Chinese as the main language.
• There are two main products: Hipihi World and Hipihi Home
  • Hipihi World is exactly like Second Life: avatars can fly and modify their own appearances, build houses, explore the land with planes, choppers and hot air balloons, which HipiHi calls public transportation systems. You can also have steering controls over your flight, offering a chance to fly your own plane. Options for parachuting also exists. The World seems to be organized around malls and town squares with socializing at its very core. Of course, avatars can also buy land and build their own houses. I see a lucrative industry coming up.
  • Hipihi Home appears to be modelled after CyWorld. It is positioned as a personal space and private communication platform between friends. Users will own their “living rooms”, procure furniture and be able to invite their friends to their “homes” and attend parties at others too. Whats most interesting is the mention of a convergence between internet and mobile. Could Hipihi be a dual-screen innovation? We will have to wait for the launch
• Like Second Life, Hipihi users will own the property rights to their in-world creations.
• There will also be a in-world currency, implying a virtual economy to facilitate user-to-user transactions. Perhaps the first and Chinese-originated millionaire in Second Life, Anshe Chung, has made virtual world creators think Chinese are the best market for such a product?

Kaiser Kuo, who is accredited for this post, has the following thoughts:

My gut tells me that done right, this could be quite substantial in China, and might have more legs than its U.S. counterpart. For one thing, MMORPG culture is pretty deeply embedded among Chinese netizens, and many players are very used to “repatriating” currency earned in the in-game economy to real life. HiPiHi seems to have made dumbed-down object creation tools available while keeping more advanced options available to the more proficient–don’t quote me on that, I’ve not really played around with it yet.

There’s a definite feminine sensibility to the pitch video, which you can download (.wmv) here: a female narrator and avatar, emphasis on the outfits, the landscaping, the houses. Going after women is probably the right move: there are plenty of online gamers in China, but few of the hack-and-slash MMORPGs really work for women.

The promotional video done by Hipihi is available below. Again, its all narrated in Chinese but it being visual-based video, is self-explanatory enough.

Update: This article, via a syndication on the SGEntrepreneurs blog, has also been picked up by Raph Koster and Gigagamez.

Wow. Big words, among other things, it also invented a new word “Communitainment” (See Point No. 3) to feed the raging flames of Web 2.0. Key findings from this report (which dun seem to be privy to nosey folks like me):

1. We expect global online advertising revenue to reach $81.1 billion by 2011, representing a 21% CAGR (2006-2011).
2. The User Revolution. The advertising world is going through a revolution, one that we call the “User Revolution” as it is happening primarily with the consumers, who are taking control of content consumption and branding. We believe this trend will cause a significant rise in prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.
3. “Communitainment.” The Internet has increasingly become a principal medium for community, communication, and entertainment–three areas that have collided together and are impacting each other’s growth–generating a new type of activity that we call communitainment.
4. The Internet Is Mainstream. The Internet has become a mainstream media outlet that now rivals traditional media for reach and advertising dollars.
5. Media Fragmentation. The proliferation of online and offline media outlets has resulted in shrinking television audiences and an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
6. The Golden Search. We believe search continues to gain ground, driven by the rise of search as the New Portal, the increasing use of search in branding campaigns, and the local search opportunity.
7. We believe Google‘s wide variety of non-search-related products creates a virtuous cycle of brand affinity that drives incremental search volume.
8. Video Ads Could Drive The Next Wave. We believe Internet video ads could become a game changer for large brand advertisers, who are used to the 15- or 30-second TV commercial
9. Internet Usage Patterns Are Changing. Portals maintain the highest reach, but the fastest growing category of destinations is communitainment sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
10. Ad networks are experiencing increased demand due to increasing Internet fragmentation, desire for more targeted inventory, increasing usage of networks for branding, and increased site visibility.
11. Agencies are rapidly evolving into more sophisticated, technology-savvy entities that combine best of breed offerings.
12. Watch These Companies. We espect companies such as Google (and YouTube), Yahoo!, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Microsoft, InterActive, Facebook, Craigslist, Brightcove, Yelp, SINA Corp., Baidu, aQuantive, ValueClick, 24/7 Media, Netflix, Wikipedia, MobiTV, Digg, and Hakia to be the most important players to watch.

Is there something you do not know here? While this report incorporates China’s major internet players, Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy China is sceptical on the gross revenue figures due to the small size of China’s internet revenue base, despite impressive growth percentages.

I prefer to focus on ONE important trend mentioned. Of consumers taking over brand perceptions on the web. The online revolution has given a voice to the long-suffering consumers of many companies and I believe the uproar over some malpractices and product quality of companies that we have seen from Edelman’s Walmart disasters, Dell Hell is only the tip of the iceberg as consumers learn to band together and organize themselves. Two-way communication services such as IM and blogs will continue to be even more embedded in the service infrastructures of companies (the Customer Support department), product development processes to incorporate feedback and make pre-market testing more transparent and effective by giving sneak peeks to alpha consumers or bloggers. Marketers will also do well to start fine-tuning their advertising plans. This does not extend to 30-second TV commercials or the online equivalent of banner ads or video ads. They need to look at more interactive and engaging medium, perhaps Second Life properties for more immersive experiences, more advertorials in major online blogs and media outlets – essentially have higher visibility and presence to minimize the communication distance between corporate and consumer.

In response to the new word “Communitainment”, i will also invent my own – The Blogonsumer (Blogger + Consumer).

Watch out, corporate world.

This is nothing new to those of us who don’t watch much TV anyway but spend hours on Youtube/ Daily Motion catching the latest Jap anime like Bleach, Death Note, Naruto or American TV drama like LOST, Heroes. Youtube is the new Napster or Kazaa or whatever you call it. The days of the TV locking us in with their millitant and rigid programming schedules are over. And if TV execs will stop sueing poor folks like us, they should wise up to the new realities of internet media.

Because Internet is simply the way to go for video entertainment. The slower the TV execs realize this the better for all of us. More regular Joes and Janes like us can have a shot at stardom and infamy on the web. Think LonelyGirl15 from Youtube (pic above) and the Backdorm Boys from China (who spoofed the Backstreet Boys on their way to fame, and even had their own merchandise).

Secondly, we have a shot at earning money from our less professionally but more engaging content before the suits and corporate fatcats gobble us up with their well oiled business machinery.

Amateur Content: The New Black

Have you heard of DiggNation? The cult favorite video series among the 18-34 geek audience that features Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame . Here’s what Business 2.0 has to say about it:

(A) packed trade-show audience of more than 700, peering up at the makeshift stage, cheers wildly for the start of the main act: Digg’s 30-year-old founder Rose and his spike-haired sidekick Albrecht, slouched on a couch, sipping beers, and staring down at laptops between their knees. A lone videocamera records the action…

… By the end of the taping – held at the recent Macworld show in San Francisco – dozens of tech fanboys rush the stage as the co-hosts toss out bumper stickers and T-shirts. Nearly an hour later, Rose and Albrecht are still posing for cell-phone pictures with fans.

Diggnation is no wimp in the money and viewership stakes too.

Just a year and a half out of the gate, Diggnation draws about 250,000 viewers a week and is among the most popular free video podcasts on Apple’s iTunes service – alongside offerings from ABC, the BBC, and CNN (which, along with Business 2.0 and CNNMoney.com, is owned by Time Warner (Charts)). It’s also making some decent coin: The show has had 15 sponsors thus far, each paying as much as $10,000 per episode.

A single guy manning the videocam. Can you believe what TV execs in the ’90s or ’80s will say when they hear of this? Today’s execs can only shake their heads and despair. Yea.. =D Amateur content rocks and is in fashion!

If you never heard of Diggnation, then there’s the notoriously popular “Lonelygirl15″ too, starring a real actress (American-New Zealander Jessica Rose) as a fictional angst-sy 17-year-old teen. Lonelygirl15 was so popular on Youtube that it spurred an online investigation by its fans for the real identity of this teen. When the facts were finally out, New York Times felt it worthy of their coverage. Jessica Rose, instead of suffering from the “witch-hunt”, went onto a role with United Nations and will also star along Lindsay Lohan in an upcoming movie. If you ignore the fact Lonelygirl15 was produced by a good backend team of producers, what a massive ego boost to any webcam-toting teeny-bopper around the world!

From Reel-life “Desperate Housewives” to Real-life “Desperate Advertisers”

(Marketers) want to get in front of video watchers and Web publishers that want their money. U.S. online video ad expenditures are expected to total $775 million in 2007, up 89% from last year, according to market research firm eMarketer. But that’s still only about 4% of projected total U.S. online ad spending of $19.5 billion. To increase that number, the industry may need to figure out a new way to advertise. (Via Forbes)

There is a huge pressure for advertisers to reach out to the expanding and highly loyal audiences watching all these online videos on the video-sharing sites. Whether its amateurish stuff like LonelyGirl15, Rocketboom or DiggNation, or professional and “stolen” copyrighted content like LOST, advertisers want IN.

While inserting video ads alongside such video content appears to be an intuitive solution, advertisers, content producers and channel owners have their own mind demons to overcome. The wide range of media formats make advertisers sceptical of appropriate brand depictions and scaling of their messages across the mass audience. Measurement metrics are also immature to track such a new form of advertising. Content producers who produce good content worthy of monetization are in short supply and its currently hard to band them together to create a large enough media inventory for advertisers. As for channel owners, the jury is still out on whether major video sharing sites like Youtube, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, Veoh can fight off the legal vultures circling the laissez-faire uploading culture of their young user bases.

Its like fighting a guerilla war sometimes as you watch Youtube take down copyrighted content as soon as the young renegade uploaders wage their pocket raids and provide the latest shows to serve the expectant viewers (like myself).

What’s in it for all of us?

Get out that webcam, line up your prettiest friends in front of it and a few good men who know their videos and lighting behind it… Then, upload on Youtube/ MySpace and then watch that money roll in..

TV might not be dead, but it sure hurts for a while while the Youtube stars revel in the limelight.

1. Installing Google Analytics to understand my readers and website traffic. I used to have a basic version at the old blog that only gives me more questions than answers.

2. Getting Google Adsense to get a sense of how online advertising works. (okay, maybe only direct response ads for Adsense but i want to play with more vendors in future)

3. Understanding what i call “website architecture”. Having my own domain means I don’t have to be limited to only WordPress as my blogging platform. I could tinker around with more WP plugins, third party apps & widgets that was not possible on the old WP-hosted blog.

On a sidenote, have you ever wondered how bloggers get their traffic? Rohit Bhargava has a good summary here.

“Can you talk about “Business” or “Entrepreneurship” for more than 3 minutes when you were 17?”

I am good at BS, so I sure could =D But it won’t make sense to those who really knew. I wanted to develop a presentation that excited the young audience without killing their interest by boring them with details. Thats where the E27 philosophy came in. We invoked a lot of excitement by highlighting Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Blake Ross, Mark Zuckerberg, the Youtube guys — most of which were 1-5 year timeframes away from the young audience when they started up. But inspiring them was easy, the meat of the presentation was the tricky part.

I had ONE BIG Challenge: the Curse of Knowledge.

1. I had way too much knowledge from my years of starting up and working for a startup. A fine line had to be drawn between simplicity and quality.

2. These kids had their own Curse of Knowledge too – from Google. I have to help them navigate through that surplus of information that plagues modern society today.

We realized 3 things early in developing our presentation:

1. A business plan format is really boring and tedious to 17-year-olds.

2. Everything was available on Google.

3. We are all very good “buying” consumers but we just dunno what its like on the other “selling” side.

We ditched the entire business plan format as the focus. And did away with a lot of business jargon like sustainable competitive advantage, core competency, value proposition. At its very core, entrepreneurship=business=making money. To me, entrepreneurship is making money with soul as a real human being. (You have to curb some human instincts when you work in a big corporation.) Injecting what you know about human society, their psychology and their attitudes towards buying things. All of us are humans and we are in contact with many businesses every day. And thats the angle I took.

Since everybody could google “Business plan writing” anytime, we focused on 3 key concepts that will be good filters in knowing the core of what it takes to write a good business plan. These filters were intended to be the mental “Compasses” to navigating the “GoogleLand” and overcoming the Curse of Knowledge.

1. Unfair Advantage

2. Positioning

3. Strategy

These were smart kids and I tried to make the examples and analogies as close and personal to them as possible. I asked that what shoes they wear, the food they eat, the MP3 player they like and what other company dominates their consciousness. From there, I explained why Nike, Singapore Airlines, AirAsia, Apple iPod conquers the business world and their minds.

Hopefully, it was all engaging. The room was bloody cold and the kids were dressed in T-shirts and shorts. I feared there would be a mass exodus midway through the lecture due to hypothermia fears. =D Thankfully, there wasn’t. Lets see if any of them find this blog post so we all get some real feedback.

Made by the Gmail team, this video is great for pple who dunno about its kickass features. Especially in Asia where so many pple are still stuck on oter crappy email apps. Having used Gmail for a long time, I like the video cos I was able to see why a new user will like Gmail cos it really solves problems in sorting out the mess in your inbox.

Credit to Tony Chung’s Geekwhat.

My favourite part is Section 5 “Community and Social Media Marketing”. I believe widgets will rule this year and get really mainstream, after Vista launches.