Platforms like Musical.ly and Vine have helped find the next-generation of internet stars in the West, now Chinese internet giant Tencent is aiming to ride that wave to boost its presence in Southeast Asia’s emerging internet space.
Tencent has teamed up with Ookbee , a digital content startup that runs an online book and magazine business, to launch Ookbee U. The venture is designed to identify and promote “user generated content” in Thailand, and later the wider Southeast Asia region, with a focus on all kinds of online media. It aims to gather over a million pieces of content over the next three years.
“Ookbee was born in time of ebooks and magazine, working with professional content creators and publishers. We used to compete with traditional book stores, but for this new company idea is to be more flexible,” Ookbee CEO Natavudh Pungcharoenpong told TechCrunch.
“The format can be anything,” he added. “More than just books: music, comics, and experimenting with video.”
Southeast Asia is home to more than 600 million consumers and, thanks to steadily growing sales of smartphones , its internet economy is tipped to grow more than ten-fold over the next decade. Thailand, the region’s third-largest country with a 65 million population, is seen as a key part of that promise.
Tencent has long seen the potential and it has a significant presence in Thailand via Sanook, the country’s most popular online portal which it fully acquired last month following an initial $10.5 million investment back in 2010. While terms of the new joint venture were not made public, a source with knowledge of discussions revealed that Tencent has agreed to invest at least $19 million in the entity. (The deal doesn’t include an investment in Ookbee itself, Pungcharoenpong did confirm.)
Tencent has struggled to make WeChat, the messaging app that dominates in China, popular in Thailand — Japan’s Line is the leading player — but it has seen success with Joox, its free music app which claims over 20 million registered users in the country. The Ookbee U initiative is closely aligned with Joox and other Tencent initiatives. Artists who upload music and gain attention on the platform could be mentored and fast-tracked into Joox stars, according to Pungcharoenpong, who is also a partner with 500 Startups’ Thailand fund ‘500 Tuktuks’.
“Hopefully we will have some new talents. Everyone will start out not so professional but eventually would love to be on board with Joox,” he told TechCrunch. The aim is “finding talent and eventually making them professional.”
With Tencent also planning to produce video content in Thailand, there’s yet further synergy.
Music and video are perhaps the most obvious areas for finding new talent, but Ookbee — which has raised over $9 million from investors to date — is very much on board for content itself. The five-year-old company is present in five countries in Southeast Asia but the majority of its eight million registered users are in Thailand. Pungcharoenpong said he hopes Ookbee U will help it will unearth star writers of the future.
“We plan to empower our artists. They will start out independent, but if they want to monetize then they can own their IP and we will do revenue share. There is also an IP sign-up where we select good content to buy [outright] or share revenue,” he explained.

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Analyst Gartner is projecting flat growth for worldwide device shipments; it says the combined shipments of PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones will total just 2.3 billion in 2017, the same as 2016 estimates — with no growth in these so-called “traditional” computing devices expected until 2018.
As of the end of 2016, nearly seven billion of these gadgets were in use globally, by its reckoning.
But while Gartner sees a “stagnating” market for the various devices that are now associated with computing — with mobile phone shipments only growing in emerging Asia/Pacific markets, for example, and the PC market “just reaching the bottom of its decline”, as research director Ranjit Atwal puts it — the analyst has a more positive outlook for supplementary connected devices which offer a more dedicated vs general computing purpose. So the rise of the ‘hardware app’ if I can put it like that.
“We’ve done the market growth part in terms of those core devices, now it’s a case of what other more dedicated devices do we build around that? And the ecosystem to enhance those capabilities across the board,” says Atwal.
“We’ve gone through the saturation of the existing markets — either we say, that’s it; people are not going to buy anything else. Or there are these new markets.”
The emerging categories that Gartner believes consumers are now looking to — for “fresher experiences and applications” — include head mounted displays (HMDs), and virtual personal assistant (VPA) speakers and wearables. So devices such as VR/AR headsets, and — on the VPA front — Amazon’s voice-driven Echo speaker (pictured above) which houses its Alexa voice assistant and can be commanded to do things like play music, tell you the weather, or buy stuff on Amazon.
And while Gartner does not yet have any solid device forecasts for these nascent categories, Atwal says it has conducted surveys that indicate growing consumer use of voice-driven functionality on smartphones. In turn, it reckons that indicates a trend towards consumers actively seeking to separate out some of the capabilities found in their phones and PCs into standalone devices — not least because of how battery life continues to constrain smartphone use.
“We’ve seen that, over the last couple of years, people using voice capabilities more and more,” he says, adding: “The trend here is really about how users are looking for different ways of interacting with their devices. And then providing a better experience.”
“There’s so much we do with the phone. And we’re probably getting to the point where we would like supplementary devices that will take on some of that load,” he continues. “The one device is good but it is getting overloaded in terms of having to get out your phone every time. So… a less frictionless way of meeting our desires and wants and needs.
“The Echo’s an example of that where it’s a direct, voice-driven capability that you can use, that you don’t have to interact with in apps once you’re set up… To really get the best out of these new capabilities there’s got to be dedicated devices.”
Unsurprisingly, Atwal is expecting to see lots more Echo-type devices unboxed at this year’s CES. However given how dedicated in functionality these additional devices are, the analyst is not expecting the same exponential shipments growth as was seen with mobiles and PCs. It’s not a like for like comparison. Nor is VR or voice — at least not yet — a whole new computing paradigm.
“These newer devices will grow, but not at the same exponential rate that we saw with this core devices,” he tells TechCrunch. “These are additional, supplementary, and we’ll see them more services driven.”
Supplementary devices are also more demanding, in terms of the services that must be slickly integrated with them. Which Atwal notes might give advantages to different players here vs traditional hardware vendors — with one example there being how Amazon has leveraged its ecommerce empire as the underpinning foundation for Echo.
“Amazon has been working towards this the past 10 years,” notes Atwal. “This is not their way in — this is additional avenues for them to build their existing revenue streams. But no doubt at CES we’ll see a number of vendors bringing out VPA-enabled speakers, we’ll see a number of vendors bringing out VR and AR capabilities.”
Whereas many wearables, for example, have faltered by failing to have truly compelling services tied to them. “Wearables is an example of ‘it’s not going to stick straight away’, and it’s an example of ‘you can’t just provide devices that are just hardware based’,” he adds. “It’s got to be more complicated, it’s got to be solution, services driven, and it won’t be necessarily the same vendors that we have at the moment.”
Generally, Atwal says this add-on wave of connected devices is going to be more verticalized — pointing out this is now happening in the wearables space, where health and fitness is emerging as the most compelling use-case (vs earlier attempts to offer a more multifaceted proposition).
“People have a lot of general purpose devices. The phone is general purpose, the PC is general purpose, the tablet to a large extent is. TV… We have a lot of general purpose devices. We don’t need more general purpose devices, we need dedicated devices that enhance the general purpose device,” he adds.
How big is this supplementary devices market? While the volumes of devices shipping is projected to be far less than the levels of traditional, general purpose computing devices, by 2020 Gartner is expecting that a fifth of the total spend on all devices will be going towards these newer types of gizmos — so that’s across the board spend, from VR to connected speakers to wearables.
So 20 per cent of a $700 billion market goes some way to explaining the frenzy of specialized devices being demoed right now at CES.
And that’s just the hardware tip of course. The real scramble here is the potential for services revenue that vendors are hoping will flow from the sensors attached to these devices.
“The interesting revenue streams around this will be services,” adds Atwal. “That’s where the equation changes, and that’s where the players who are doing this will be interesting to see whether they are still the traditional players — the hardware vendors — or whether there’s opportunities for others.
“So for every Echo that Amazon sells how much more can Amazon get from the revenue stream from people buying through Amazon?”

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Asian Facebook clone Snow caught the attention of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , who tried unsuccessfully to buy it last year, and it is continuing to grow steadily. The app’s Korean parent Naver today confirmed it crossed 100 million downloads in December, with 40-50 percent of its userbase active on the app each month.
Those are pretty impressive figures for a one-year-old project, but still some way behind Snapchat. The U. S. company, tipped to go public in a $4 billion IPO , has 150 million daily active users. Snow has targeted very different geographies to its rival, though. China is the largest market in terms of users, with Japan and Korea following respectively, although the company did not disclose raw figures for its userbase in these countries.
Those official figures are on par with data we reported from October, when a source told us that Snow had surpassed 80 million downloads and was adding 10 million per month. Back in the July, The New York Times reported that the app was at around 30 million downloads.
Like many other Western services, Snapchat is blocked in China. Snow, which mimics the U. S.-based app but with many more options for face filters and stickers, has stepped up to fill the gap in some ways, but it is still just scratching surface. The Chinese government estimates that there are over 700 million internet users in the country, so even the most optimistic figures for Snow in China — say, for example, that half of those 100 million downloads are from the country — would represent a mere drop in the ocean.
But, there’s doubtless potential there. Naver saw fit to reject Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s advances because it believes it has a hit on its hands. Chat app Line, Naver’s biggest success to date, raised over $1 billion in a dual Japan-U. S. IPO in July of this year, and the firm sees similar possibilities for Snow. Indeed, Naver strengthened ties between the two services in September when Line made a $45 million investment in Snow at a $180 million valuation. You’d suspect that latter figure has gone up a few notches in the months that have passed.

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Garmin never heads to a CES without a whole bunch of different products in two. Along with a whole bunch of in-car GPS devices (yes, people still make and buy in-car GPS devices), the navigation-turned-wearable maker is expanding its fitness focused offerings with the addition of a trio of new Fenix multisport watches—the Fenix 5, 5S and 5X, which are, as the name implies, all variations on a theme.
The baseline Fenix 5 is more compact than its predecessor but still pretty big, with a 47mm frame. The 5S, meanwhile, marks the first time the company has designed add a device to the line aimed at users with smaller wrists. At 42mm, it’s not exactly compact, but should do a better job opening the line up to a larger user base, while maintaining the line’s standard functionality.
The 5X sounds downright gigantic with a 51mm frame. It’s got all sort of added bikes-specific features built in, including TOPO US mapping and routable cycling maps.
All the new models have constant heart rate monitoring built-in and multisport tracking, including modes for running, swimming, biking, hiking and the like. Plus, naturally, built-in GPS and GLONASS navigation and a barometric altimeter, along with the standard array of motion tracking sensors. All are water resistant to 100 meters and feature ruggedized casing. The 5X also has an optional sapphire lens for added scratch resistance.
The watches are set to arrive this quarter, priced at $600 for the 5 and 5S and $700 for the 5X.

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