Ten Asia tech startups to watch

These are ten startups worth watching over the coming 12 months. Each of these startups qualified as finalists in the Echelon 2011 Singapore LaunchPad.

Identifii

Identifii aims to make career discovery simpler for young professionals by helping to solve the problems they face when selecting their career. The company seeks to educate their users about their personality preferences in order to help them make better career decisions. On the employee side, Identifii enables employees to target applicants whose personality characteristics and aptitude suits the company requirements.

PlayMoolah

PlayMoolah is the brainchild of Min Xuan, Audrey and Alam. The company provides a fun online platform for kids, aged 5 to 11, to save, manage, and earn an allowance. PlayMoolah leverages on game mechanics for behavior change, empowering children with the curiosity, knowledge, skills and tools needed for financial capability. Meanwhile, parents are equipped with a separate platform to monitor, reward, and engage with their child’s progress.

Fetch Plus Asia Pacific

Fetch Plus’ product, FetchFans, is an interactive custom brand design engine built for commercial use that designs templates for Facebook, Twitter and blogs through a three-step process. This allows companies to update their pages with messages, new offers and promotions quickly in order to always be in contact with their customer base.

LoveByte

They always say “The more, the merrier”. LoveByte looks to bring this to blogging, from the bloggers point. Instead of a lone blogger, think blogging as a couple activity. LoveByte is a couple blogging application that aims to inject an element of romance into the activity. The application incentivize couples to contribute actively towards perserving their special moments together through fun challenges and rewards.

Not a Basement Studio

Not a Basement Studio is made out of a team of five Vietnamese students in the Singapore Management University who are captivated with developing apps for the iPhone and iPad. Their product, Wikly! Glance, aims to replace all your boring, native calendar apps with something beautiful and intuitive. Wikly! Glance provides users with the ability to customize their calendars with many of the apps beautifully designed themes. Not only look forward to an exciting week ahead, enjoy jotting down those activities too!

Fezzl

With the Groupon clone wars still raging, Fezzl might have found a niche with its product, Zuupy CrowdDeals. This daily deal site aims to help business go viral with their deals by using the Facebook “Like” button as a way users claim deals. Deals are not activated until a minimum number of “Likes” are clicked. For non-Facebook users out there, clicking the “Like” button posts an update the user’s own wall, exposing the deal to all their friends.

Taxizu

Care to share a taxi with a random stranger travelling a similar route in order to reduce cost? Think peak-hour surcharges and I bet your wallets are begging for this. Taxizu is a Hong Kong-based startup that with an application that allows taxi sharing and social organization. The application allows user to collaborate and self-organize to share taxis on long-haul taxi routes. Users get to publish their preferred travelling details prior to departure in order to find share-mates and can also socially rank their ride share peers.

Twidl Inc.

Twidl Inc. is a Philippines based company that is building a social network around picture journals called PicLyf (pronounced pik-layf). The company’s product is going up against other photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Instagram but is confident that their ability to motivate updates (through badges, topics and leaderboards), ease-of-use, focus on static pictures and network-generated audience will appeal to shutterbugs out there.

Spatial Ideas

Spatial Ideas aims to integrate information from online news sites and social media in order to built the ultimate marketing tool, LocoBuzz. This powerful map-based analytics and communications platform allows marketers to identify potential customers, spot trends and evaluate marketing campaigns. The unique selling point of Spatial Ideas over their competitors is their easy-to-use UI, which they believe appeals to users of such services.

Stylelogue

Combining fashion with technology to simplify the search for all the right answers to fashion woes is what Stylelogue aims to do. The mobile and web application allows style-savvy users to communicate, share and receive information on all the latest hots and nots of the fashion industry. By focusing on the local market and publishing real styles by real people, Stylelogue looks to appeal to their target market based on relevance and convenience.

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