Here’s one to throw on your calendars, friends: DrupalCamp 2012. All around the world, the communities that support the open source content management platform, Drupal (what is Drupal, you ask?), are getting together and Taipei is no different.

On July 7th-8th, a two-day conference is taking place in Taipei, and contrary to the hardcoreness often found at these types of conferences, this year’s DrupalCamp is aimed at the newbies.

In hoping to attract new people to the community, the official theme for the event is ‘Drupal 101 – the first lesson of Drupal.’ Additionally, the organizers are bringing in Drupal heavy hitter John Albin Wilkins, a top-20 community contributor to the Drupal movement, for this third consecutive event in Taipei.

So come on out and find out more about the only community-developed CMS (if it floats my boat, maybe I’ll make the switch from WordPress). Early bird registration has begun, and there’s info on the event both in 中文 and English, so really, there’s no excuse not to show. See you there!

Tickets to DrupalCamp 2012 are NT600 with the early bird discount. Register here.

From its beginnings in 2004 to its IPO this year, it’s tough to argue that Yelp hasn’t set the standard for review sites around the world. Its service provided the individual with unprecedented ability to voice both the good and bad, and ever since, few entrants have strayed very far from Yelp’s tried and true model.

Taiwan’s Citydomo, however, is breaking out of the Yelp mold by adding a layer of user incentivization to the review process. The site rewards users with points, called Domo Dollars, for participating in the site that can be exchanged for a variety of rewards. After a promising start this spring, Founders Kevin Lin and Joe Pearce hope that in a rewards-happy country, this rewards system coupled with a renewed vigor after last week’s Echelon’s Taipei satellite event will open a gateway for these relative newcomers.

Citydomo's rewards, and the D$ that buy them, are a major focus of the site

On Citydomo’s charming home page (“I think a lot about the design and UI of the site,” Lin admits) the rewards sit front and center: ice skating, t-shirts, and spa treatments are listed, all with their respective Domo Dollar (D$) prices. With 1-to-1 NT-to-D$ parity in mind, the site gives these points away for participating in the site. Writing a review will net you 10 D$, while posting a photograph of an establishment will get you 2 D$.

“We had one of our team members test it out, and you can earn about 300 D$ in an hour,” Lin says.

In order to maintain a high quality on the site, users can lose D$ as well. Each time a review is voted down, 2 D$ are lost. In order to combat reviews of the more sinister variety that are intended to game the system, Citydomo enforces a three strike rule: the first two times users write nonsense reviews, they lose all of their accumulated D$, while the third time results in a ban from the site.

The Citydomo homepage sports social features, hot picks, and best of six different review categories

How Citydomo works (in Chinese, click for larger)

This rewards system has helped Duke business school classmates Pearce and Lin net over one thousand Citydomo users in their site’s brief beta period that began in April. The site features nearly 700 reviews in the restaurant category alone, and around 200 reviews in other categories.

The team is bootstrapped for now, but has been meeting investors and making the rounds at events more and more now that the site is public. Eventually, they’d like to progress to other Taiwanese cities and to a phase where consultations with individual brands are also a source of income, but for now they are focused on building the site.

“We’ve settled on our business model, but in the end… we don’t want to be too business-y,” says Lin.

With its Domo Dollars, Citydomo is hoping that it can catalyze users into getting involved and staying involved and can continue to partner with rewards providers that encourage participation, launching the team into a trajectory of reviews that is all their own.

Last night the Singporean blog E27 held their Taiwan satellite event in Taipei. Fourteen teams, mostly from Taiwan but also several from Hong Kong, Korea, and even the British Virgin Islands, took to the stage to pitch their startups and product ideas. In the end, the five judges (RIM’s Alan Wong, appWorks’ Jamie Lin, E27’s Thaddeus Koh, TMI Holdings’ Mark Hsu, and KKBox’s Izero Lee) chose Ragic, an enterprise startup delivering a suite of spreadsheet-based business applications, as the best in show.

Ragic offers six different business solutions as well as a Ragic application store that are based on the premise that traditional versions of these software are difficult to use for people of a non-tech background. There was a live demonstration of the software on stage, and the judges were impressed when, in response to a question about pricing, founder Jeff Kuo was able to pull up a full-fledged live website with robust pricing info.

HuliHealth co-founder David Chao presents on stage

Several hundred people were in attendance for the Taipei satellite event that was the 5th in a series of six satellite events happening across Asia that are designed to scout out the 50 best teams in the region and invited them to the Echelon main stage to be held in Singapore on June 11-12th. The event started off with opening remarks from E27 (and myself, where I pontificated on about neurons, axons, and bridges… or something), and four keynote speeches: Sanjay Shivkumar spoke about the creation of his Singaporean parking app ‘Summon Auntie’, TMI’s Mark Hsu discussed the Southeast Asian opportunity for Taiwan, Alan Wong spoke about creating apps on BlackBerry’s App World, and Frederico Folcia, whose Roomorama just received a US$2.1m investment, talked about how to avoid making very specific mistakes that he made during his startup experience.

TMI awards DocuBank with the TMI award

Several surprise awards were offered up, including a BlackBerry Playbook tablet for each of the presenting teams. Additionally, TMI announced that it was going to offer an impromptu incubation opportunity to one team. DocuBank, a cloud-based document management system, won this award and is now considering the offer.

TechOrange was a media partner for this event, and it was a blast of an event to host, and was notable in that it was the first startup event hosted in Taipei not put on by someone directly in the Taiwan ecosystem. For that alone, I think E27 deserves some serious propers. Go sign up for the main event (June 11-12), or if that’s a bit much, like them on Facebook.

Here are all of the teams in the order they presented:

1. WhatsTheNumber – An app that quickly and easily finds a phone number for you. A yellow pages killer.
2. HuliHealth – Find, contact, and book a doctor or dentist worldwide. Check out Catherine Shu’s great article on them in the Taipei Times!
3. Busification – Gamification of enterprise software
4. Justaple – We wrote about these guys last June, a productivity app that allows you to ‘staple’ any webpage.
5. iDonate – A charitable fund manager
6. CityDomo – A restaurant review platform that encourages reviews by offering rewards
7. iBeengo Trip Planner – A drag-and-drop trip planning tool. Read here for a bit more.
8. Long Good – A game to encourage stretching and healthy exercise.
9. Docubank – A cloud-based document management system. Winner of the TMI award.
10. Snapshock – An event-based photo broadcaster. Perfect for weddings!
11. Recood – Instagram for video, via Korea.
12. Ragic – Business applications made easy. Judges’ Choice.
13. I-Influence – Social media analytics
14. LuxJoy – Discount luxury online retailer

Singapore’s E27 is in the midst of a series of pan-Asia satellite events to find and invite 50 of the hottest Asian startups to the main stage of their signature Echelon event.

Save the date: Taipei’s satellite event is happening next Tuesday (4/24), and will be emceed by none other than yours truly. Register here (it’s free!), and check out more info about the Taipei satellite here or 這裡(中文).

The Deets:

• When: April 24th, 1 pm – 9 pm
• Where: 北國際會議中心, 11049 Taipei, Taiwan信義路五段1號  (#1, Xinyi Road Section 5, Taipei)
• Who’s attending: Check the Facebook event page!

Five suggested reasons you should consider attending are:

1. Taipei Satellite is in English and attendance is FREE.
2. Hear startups pitch to venture out into other markets.
3. Learn about other developing regional markets.
4. Find out more about the Southeast Asian market, especially Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam.
5. Network with key community leaders from Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

This years’ Echelon events are taking place in Jakarta, Manila, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh, Tokyo, and Taipei. Winners of Echelon are eligible for a slew of prizes, including a gadget package from Research In Motion and membership in their BlackBerry Alliance Program.

As media partners for the event, TechOrange is stoked that the links between Asian startup locations are being forged evermore strongly. Looking forward to seeing you there, come find me and say hello!

Cubie Messenger, a new messaging app from game developer Gamelet, has passed 400,000 downloads in just over a month, ranking 1st in the social networking category in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. It is currently the number 1 iPhone app in Malaysia, regardless of category.

The Taipei-based company released the app for Android in late February, with the iOS version joining it towards the end of March.

Since adding extra features and more functionality, including the ability to draw pictures using different colored pens and send them in-app to your recipient, downloads quickly surpassed 200,000 by mid April. Since receiving coverage in e27 last Friday, they’ve doubled their user numbers. The reason, says Gamelet co-founder Cjin Cheng, is because Asian users respond better to images than just text alone. “We’ve added more colors and new features such as copying previous images to use again or enhance. By sticking to these core ideas, we hope to increase user numbers across Asia. Going forward, we have a Japanese version ready to go, and are just really excited to see the response from users.”

What’s cool about Cubie is that it combines the best of several applications that have entered the market in recent months. First, free text messaging applications such as What’s App, Beluga, Kik etc. took center stage, and got tonnes of users and in some cases bought out by rivals.  Updates added emoticons, additional features, group chat functions to extend the shelf life of these services, and continued to cause strife for the incumbent mobile carriers, who stood to lose out on revenue. Then this year, the explosion and later acquisition of OMGPOP’s Draw Something ignited a drawing fetish in smartphone users around the world, leading to the obvious conclusion: Who’s going to put all these ideas together in one app?

If you’ve taken a ride on Taipei’s modern MRT subway system will know that the Taiwanese are addicted to their smartphones, no thanks in large part to the rise of free social messaging apps, digital content and social gaming. For ages, the app-du-jour was What’s App, with it’s 99c download, free for ever business model. Then came LINE, a product developed by Naver, a South Korean web portal which is in turn backed by NHN Corporation. LINE has been heavily marketed in Taiwan, including on TV, where they’ve signed up actress and model Gwei Lun-Mei (桂綸鎂) as their spokesperson (Her previous contracts include Christian Dior, Kose and 7-11, so you know how deep Naver’s pockets are).

While both What’s App and LINE are still popular in Taiwan, they lack the fun and functionality that Cubie has so simply mashed together. Cjin goes on to explain that the most popular uses are drawing and voice messages, two features neither of the two incumbents currently offer. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out, but with strong numbers going forward, it might prove a winning model for Cubie. Cubie for iPhone can be downloaded here, and for Android here.

In what was perhaps the largest nod to the internet startup industry here in Taiwan to date, several major figures from the Taiwanese government participated in ‘Start-up Taiwan,’ a full-day event held last Friday dedicated to small and medium enterprise.

Taiwan’s Vice President-Elect Den-Yih Wu (吳敦義), Economic Minister Yen-Shiang Shih (施顏祥), and Executive Yuan Premier Chun Chen (陳冲) all gave speeches to open the precedings that included a keynote speech on innovation by K.S. Pua and a panel discussion on globalizing and marketing startups that was arguably the highlight of the event.

Seated left to right: Christopher Fay, Polo Wu, John Fan, Chao Tung-Wen, Jerry Kuo, Far Tseng. Not pictured: Volker Heistermann, KS Pua

Even though the government representatives’ speeches were given perfunctorily, the event was symbolic nonetheless. It was the first time I can think of that such broad and politically-oriented audience members and speakers were talking about startups. Less importantly, it marked the one-year anniversary of TechOrange Global, and what an interesting year it’s been. Let’s have a look back, shall we?

TOG started out as a project to provide some English coverage to the Asian tech scene, which was largely ignored at the time by Western media. I joined Ray Lee, who was interning at TechOrange at the time, in writing about a mixture of China, Taiwan, and beyond (I chuckle as I look back at my first article for TOG, five paragraphs that drew a flimsy tie between RMB revaluation and investment in startups).

At the time, a whiff of an internet startup movement was in the air. As appWorks, the island’s first internet Silicon Valley-style startup incubator was just graduating its first class of startups, its founder Jamie Lin was the major voice of startup enthusiasm. The scene was young.

Fast forward one year to April 2012, and the progress that’s been made is almost hard to believe. A German who knew what could be settled here and started Yushan Ventures, and would go on to bring Startup Weekend and the pilot of  a new global initiative called Startup Labs here. The Japanese VCs followed by bringing CyberAgent Ventures, and the Taiwanese got TMI Labs off the ground as well. A bloke named James Hill helped Startup Digest to Taipei. Taiwan sent some teams to TechCrunch DISRUPT, a Google exec stopped by to say 加油, and a major Silicon Valley startup committed itself to having a larger Taiwan presence.

Not a bad year, eh?

Though I keep an eye on it, I don’t write as much about China anymore (though there are many excellent writers who do) because I think Taiwan is for real, man. Several teams, such as Vpon, Richi, EZTable, and Accuvally, have pulled in seven-figure rounds of investment. Hundreds of people have made startups their day jobs and the momentum is snowballing into something quite cool.

SMEs account for more than half of Taiwan’s economy, but the internet-heavy tone of Friday’s event marked the biggest governmental recognizance yet of just how important internet and mobile will be to the future of SMEs here. It’s not as enthusiastic as the Singaporean government’s support of their startups, but it’s a start.

A tough question that remains is: How does Taiwan ‘get there’? How does Taiwan get to a stage where the phrase ‘Taiwan startup’ gives people a first-tier mouthfeel? It’s a tough question because it’s as difficult to ask as it is to answer – because to ask it is to acknowledge that we aren’t really ‘there’ yet (though Eric Schmidt already said that pretty much), and that we might not even be very close yet. At least we are definitely on our way, as this past year showed. The government threw a nod in startups’ direction last Friday, but governmental kudos are a far cry from it throwing money at startups like it does biotech. It’s not even about the government, or the money really, but about us. How do we get there?

It’s not an easy question to answer, I admit, but let me propose the following Brooklynism: do you. Do You.

To Do You doesn’t mean to learn to program, necessarily, or to go hack something. It need not be startup-ing, even, nor indeed be at all business-y. Just do whatever it is that makes you look up at the clock and say “where did the last four hours go?” If that thing is not making coffee, then why would one’s biggest creative dream be to run a coffee shop? Instead, design a solution to a problem in your life or paint a picture. Write a screenplay or produce some music. Recite to your lover the poem you’ve just penned them. Teach a kid to ask ‘why.’ Start a blog. Connect with your inner geek. Don’t worry about your boss and family, they will eventually be happy that you are happy Doing You.

From these tentacles of creativity will come really great work and the seeds of dreams that are bigger than mere cafes. From these whelplings of our critical minds will come ideas so resilient to China copycats that we would wish them luck to even try. And, most importantly, we will grow a supportive community because, after all, spirit begets spirit. That is when we will have arrived ‘there.’

No doubt, this year was good, but as we all learn to Do Us, the next year and the years after that will be far, far better. I can’t wait.

Last Friday, appWorks founder and VC Jamie Lin pulled the veil from his fourth class of internet and mobile startups. This season appWorks saw its biggest class yet, sporting 24 teams looking to enter the startup fray.

To begin the show, Lin gave a quick update on past appWorks teams whom are making strong progress: Richi (working on e-commerce and e-platforms), Good Life, Tagtoo, EZTable (making a big hiring push of 20 engineers, founder Alex Chen promised a 10% raise and good dinners), Q.L.L, and MamiBuy. His remarks were followed by a few words on cross-strait cooperation in the internet space from representative from Sina, a company making its first appearance at a Taiwan startup event.

There were many teams with solid demos; here are six that TOG readers might care to know a bit about:

iBeengo founder Yen Tseng demos his travel planner

iBeengo – A drag-n-drop travel planning tool for backpackers and tourists traveling solo. Founded by a CBC (Canadian-born Chinese), based in Taipei, but partnering with North American travel companies and partners. Primarily targeted at Chinese tourists looking to step away from the group tour format, this tool allows travelers to research and plan their trip all in one place. I need to check it out a bit more, but if it’s as smooth as it looked during the demo, it could be a pretty cool tool.

Cocosplay - Developers of the mobile game KungfuGo, a round-based fighting game for iOS and Android. The team saw 1700+ downloads in the week leading up to Demo Day, charging $1.99 per download. A pretty slick looking game, overall.

Justfont - A straightforward solution to a straightforward problem: the Chinese website rendered in gibberish due to missing Asian character sets. Like a Google Web Fonts for Chinese, this is an elegant solution that allows designers to go beyond the ‘standard’ Chinese font sets in their designs. Impressive demo, cool stuff.

MobileMatrix – A vehicle intelligence system providing real time fuel economy info to the driver via tablet computer. This program was tested out on a fleet of buses in Taipei and helped realize $20,000/month in fuel savings during the trial period. Essentially, ready for scaling. A one-man company founded by a subject matter expert who had the mechanical and technological knowhow to make it all happen. Gotta love that!

Ta Mode – A fashion-forward e-commerce site specializing in Taiwanese-designed goods.

LongGood – Your personal stretching assistant, developed for the Xbox Kinect and webcam-enabled computer.

The day of the event I was putting out a tweet per team at @jeremybrandyuan. Here are the tweets on the other, no less worthy, companies to check out:

• Babylife: an app to easily allow parents to record their baby’s development. Stat-enhanced virtual baby album on web & mobile
• Kidkidding: socially-enabled education planning for parents.
• Beautymemo: an app to reserve spots at partnered hairdressers
• MikiQ: a website to introduce foodie and gourmet cuisine. Founder MikiQ is a chef
• Fooru: Restaurant reviews aggragated from food blogs. We’ve got a food theme going
• 172168: An app to order beverages and bubble teas. The six-number name makes more sense in Chinese ‘一起喝飲料吧’
• OURegion: Collects your Facebook friends’ restaurant recommendations and reviews. Lots of food apps, but then again this is Taiwan
• WalkThisWay: A pinterest-like browsing tool for tourist destinations in a city. Layers past visitors comments and reviews
• Piposea: Google map API-based social tool that allows you to meet people in the local area based on their social media interests
• EZVenture: LBS gaming to provide ‘mobile life games’
• Bosslady: e-commerce site for women’s undergarments. 2nd female founder of the day. Best accompanying visuals of the day
• 戀愛行事曆 (Dating Calendar): a dating service that allows users to create a dating calendar
• Urworks: online portfolio for artists that claims to trump FB, blogger, and other portfolio solutions
• 傑克魔豆：a Kickstarter-like system to reserve and buy a designer’s future line of products
• beAholic: A gift recommender that uses the Facebook API to recommend gifts to specific friends. Avoid giving bad gifts.
• Newsleopard: An email marketing platform
• TiNY Square: a ‘pocket mall’ mobile e-commerce platform, encouraging online-to-offline exchanges
• Toujie Media: A promotional platform that allows promo winners to select their own prizes, live demo using demoday beverage labels
• MobileMatrix: Software providing vehicular intelligence via tablets. Trial with coach bus fleet led to NT400k in fuel savings

The team behind the popular event ticketing and management platform Accupass (活動通) announced today that they accepted a round of investment. The terms of the deal were not disclosed in the announcement, though we understand it to be seven figures (US$), based on remarks made by the company’s CEO Ben Lo (羅子文) when asked.

The round was jointly led by Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of the US technology giant, and DCM, an early stage venture capital firm with a footprint in both the US and Asia. CYZone (創業邦) organizers of DEMO China also participated in the round. 

Accuvally (盈科泛利) was founded last year in Taipei, and has quickly become the leading e-ticketing platform in a market overlooked by the leading services in this space. Aside from the fact that Eventbrite and Meetup are not localized in Chinese, Accupass has many other features that are tailored to meet most event needs, including several complicated payment methods unique to Taiwan.

On the service’s back end, event planners can design sign up forms, payment plans and issue emails to registered guests, without the need to export email addresses. Payments can be made via PayPal, bank transfers, at ATMs or the convenience store payment portals such as iBon or FamilyPort. Attendees are notified by email or text, and by using QR codes can register on-site by simply scanning their phones.

The team caught investors’ attention whilst at DEMO China in August 2011, after having won the judges’ prize at 2011’s IDEAS Show. During their trip to China, the team took the overall third prize and a Wireless Business Award given by Qualcomm and Sequoia Capital. It was from there that the team began talks with Qualcomm’s investment team. DCM, who also attended the event, came in on the round with Qualcomm. Each took an equal stake in Accuvally, which has less than 10 staff in Taiwan.

This news marks the first time either venture capital firm has awarded funding to a Taiwanese company, and it’s noteworthy because it’s understood to be a significant amount, at least for a Taiwanese firm that is only a year old. DCM has invested in some of China’s well-known internet brands including Renren, Papaya Mobile, Dangdang and VIPShop, which is preparing to IPO this year. Similarly, Qualcomm’s China portfolio includes some interesting services, YongChe, an Uber-inspired car hire service, CooTek, the team behind TouchPal and Bedo, whose real time LBS app Kaikai is popular with urban Chinese youth.  It will be interesting to see either investment firm take a closer look at other startups based in Taiwan in the future.

Accuvally expects to use the funding to ramp up operations at home by reaching out to mainstream users and event-holders, and potentially look for new markets to move into. An English version is also expected to be released later this year. Looking at events on their homepage, it appears that more than just the tech community is using Accupass, a good sign if the service is to extend its reach into the mainstream.

Singapore’s e27 is getting ready for its yearly Echelon conference, which is a showcase of the region’s best startups. The organization finds these teams by holding satellite events in local markets and inviting the best teams to present on the event’s Singaporean main stage.

This year, the organization will be holding satellite events in six different cities: Jakarta, Manila, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh, Tokyo, and for the first time ever, Taipei. 

Taipei’s satellite will be held on April 24th, but team registration ends March 31st (four days away!), so interested teams should start the application process now. For entrepreneurs, it’ll be a great chance to meet the judges, mentors, investors and others startups in the community.

Who knows? Your team could win and be invited to the event’s main stage in June, a feat accomplished by Taiwan’s Cardinal Blue last year.

The Taipei event is still in the planning phases, so we’ll keep you up to date on that, but in the meantime, consider applying, and consider fast: the deadline is soon, registration is easy, and time’s-a-wastin’.

Echelon’s Taipei satellite will be held 4/24. Teams should register by 3/31 and can do so by going here.

Cameron Keng is a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur from New York. You can read more about Cameron on his website. Follow him on Twitter @cameronkeng.

The current obsession with “product” is probably the worst thing to hit the startup community since Color. Worry about selling. Building a product before you’re able to sell it is a guaranteed recipe to fail – hard.  I recently started a new business and my first task was to sell. I pre-sold my product based on the idea alone before I ever spent a dollar on development.

If you can’t sell your product to someone for cold hard cash based on the idea alone in person, then you’re in for a beating. The face-to-face selling exercise is your best chance you’ll ever have to close a sale.  Online marketing is impersonal and notoriously difficult. If you can’t sell your product with an in-person pitch and all your charm, then you’d better move on.

Knowing that your product sells is awesome. The next most important thing is to find a way to reach your target audience. Getting people to notice you when you’re a nobody sucks – period.  You need to do something big fast. After pre-selling my product, I started to work on building publicity and mind share. I chose to make a big splash by offering tons of value for nothing, while I was building the product.

I don’t have the necessary writing skills to persuade others in print, and I can’t fire off an article or press release that will bring the house down. What I can do (as well as any startup) is to create value.  It’s a lot easier to get publicity by doing something than by writing about it. I created a website (Keng Institute) that provides free continuing professional education or learning credits that one of my target audiences needs in order to retain their accounting license. Googling these credits shows that the average cost is about $89 dollars per credit. That’s epic amounts of value that I’m providing, for free.

I applied and received approval by the necessary federal and state departments in New York to become an official provider.  I’ve now cornered the market and mindshare for my target audience. They need me.  They have to come and find me to get their free credits to keep their license. This website is now part of my sales funnel to sell my product.

Was doing this a giant pain in the ass? Absolutely. Was it equally necessary? Definitely. It’s not easy to do something important enough to grab attention. But, it’s always worth at least trying.  We’re all in it to succeed and if you’ve been in the game longer than two weeks, then you know that everything we do takes an impossible amount of effort. So, do what you do best. Sell.