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Kamcord raises $7M in funding, now lets users share game videos to Line, WeChat

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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San Francisco-based Kamcord announced this morning that it has raised $7.1 million in series A funding, in a round led by Silicon Valley-based TransLink Capital. Other participants included DeNA, SV Angel, Innovation Works, KLab, M&Y Growth Partners, and XG Ventures. Kamcord’s SDK enables game developers to put a ‘movie’ button in game, and when it is pressed, users can then share video clips/replays of game play. Namco Bandai was the first Japanese company to use the localized version of Kamcord’s SDK, as we mentioned back in February. But now we understand that it’s also used in games from DeNA and Colopl. When we spoke with Kamcord co-founder Adi Rathnam last December in Kyoto (see below), he emphasized the importance of Asian markets, including Japan, Korea, and China. We wondered about the possibility of sharing Kamcord videos to Asian message services Line and WeChat, and the sharing functionalities to those networks has now been added. In their announcement this time around, Adi had this to say: In order to build a truly global platform for sharing and watching gameplay videos, we prioritized strengthening our presence in Asia. The partnerships we’ve formed with this round of funding will help us tremendously in…

kamcord

San Francisco-based Kamcord announced this morning that it has raised $7.1 million in series A funding, in a round led by Silicon Valley-based TransLink Capital. Other participants included DeNA, SV Angel, Innovation Works, KLab, M&Y Growth Partners, and XG Ventures.

Kamcord’s SDK enables game developers to put a ‘movie’ button in game, and when it is pressed, users can then share video clips/replays of game play. Namco Bandai was the first Japanese company to use the localized version of Kamcord’s SDK, as we mentioned back in February. But now we understand that it’s also used in games from DeNA and Colopl.

When we spoke with Kamcord co-founder Adi Rathnam last December in Kyoto (see below), he emphasized the importance of Asian markets, including Japan, Korea, and China. We wondered about the possibility of sharing Kamcord videos to Asian message services Line and WeChat, and the sharing functionalities to those networks has now been added. In their announcement this time around, Adi had this to say:

In order to build a truly global platform for sharing and watching gameplay videos, we prioritized strengthening our presence in Asia. The partnerships we’ve formed with this round of funding will help us tremendously in that effort.

As for Kamcord’s recent progress, we understand that users are now sharing at a pace of one video every two seconds, and that rate is sure to grow with more support for games and gamers here in Asia. The company has also recently launched a new Kamcord app (screenshots above) where you can watch fun mobile gameplay videos all in one place. You can get it for free over on the App Store.

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Inside Tencent: What lies ahead for China’s internet giant?

Masaru Ikeda Masaru Ikeda
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See the original article written in Japanese Some might suppose that Chinese internet companies would have their headquarters in the capital Beijing. But they don’t. Alibaba is headquartered in Hangzhou, while the country’s top game company Shanda is in Shanghai. And Shenzhen in the south is the home of Tencent. I recently had an opportunity to visit Shenzhen to attend Infinity Venture Partners’ LP Summit 1, during which I had a chance to visit to Tencent. The company’s headquarters are located in the Science and Technology Park in the western part of the city, inside 37-story skyrise. Surprisingly, this gigantic building is a little small for Tencent, and they’re now building another 55-story, two-tower facility. That building (a model of which you can see below) is scheduled to open in 2016, and it will house 12,000 employees. The building is designed by NBBJ, also the designers of Amazon headquarters building in Seattle. On the second floor there is a big screen that displays real-time access to Tencent’s QQ instant messaging software (see below). I saw over 170 million users accessing the service, which was probably light considering that it was a weekday morning. Also on that floor was Ubox, a…

tencent

See the original article written in Japanese

Some might suppose that Chinese internet companies would have their headquarters in the capital Beijing. But they don’t. Alibaba is headquartered in Hangzhou, while the country’s top game company Shanda is in Shanghai. And Shenzhen in the south is the home of Tencent.

I recently had an opportunity to visit Shenzhen to attend Infinity Venture Partners’ LP Summit 1, during which I had a chance to visit to Tencent. The company’s headquarters are located in the Science and Technology Park in the western part of the city, inside 37-story skyrise. Surprisingly, this gigantic building is a little small for Tencent, and they’re now building another 55-story, two-tower facility. That building (a model of which you can see below) is scheduled to open in 2016, and it will house 12,000 employees. The building is designed by NBBJ, also the designers of Amazon headquarters building in Seattle.

tencent-exhibition3b

On the second floor there is a big screen that displays real-time access to Tencent’s QQ instant messaging software (see below). I saw over 170 million users accessing the service, which was probably light considering that it was a weekday morning.

tencent-exhibition1b

Also on that floor was Ubox, a vending machine where people can buy things by paying with their mobile, either using AliPay (by Weibo) or TenPay (by Tencent). Here in Japan, there are an increasing number of vending machines accepting electronic money. In China, it seems services like Weibo and QQ are helping drive that trend too.

tencent-vendingmachine1

Virtual credit cards

Early in March, Tencent and Alibaba announced virtual credit cards within their apps WeChat and AliPay Wallet (respectively). WeChat and AliPay Wallet can be used for some things like taxi service Didi Dache and at some retail stores as well. The companies were both very excited about the launch, hailing it is an innovation in the credit card industry. But soon after launch, government authorities made them shut down the service. Tencent has made efforts to the launch its service by tying up with major banks in China. The background of the authority’s decision is not clear, but some sources say certain banks and credit-card companies were threatened by the rapid increase of virtual credit cards and may have put pressure on government.

Regarding its future strategy, Tencent aims to make financial services more accessible to general consumers by expanding to platforms like WeChat and QQ. The financial services they mention include not only credit cards but also stock exchange and other financial products. In such a big country, cities that have branch offices of a bank or financial services are still limited. So it would be a natural development for mobile apps to fill the void.

Tencent aims to provide financial services for WeChat users in China (where it’s known as Weixin), and so far has no plan to expand that to its overseas users.

Mobile app distribution

There are many homegrown mobile app distribution services catering to the Chinese market. Tencent’s MyApp has a 12% in the share in this space, falling just short of the top three, behind Baidu (38%), Qihoo (28%), and Wandoujia (15%) (as of December 2013).

Tencent’s top priority in this field is to surpass the top three players, and Tencent Open Platform represents its core strategy for doing so. Monkey Hou (pictured below) is the vice president of the Tencent Open Platform, and he brought us up to speed on their current situation.

According to him, Tencent has opened incubation spaces in 10 cities across China with the aim to incubate mobile app startups and bring more appealing apps to their platform. As part of the incubation programs, Tencent offers various benefits such as discounted cloud service, funding, and mentoring. The benefits change depending on the number of downloads for a given app.

tencent-meeting3
Tencent Open Platform, vice president Monkey Hou

In China there are over 10 mobile app distribution platforms. Some wonder why an internet giant like Tencent cannot catch up other players. But Hou explained to us that there is no player with a majority share and China’s market is still really big. He seemed confident they would soon break into the top three.

In February, Japan’ Mixi partnered with Tencent to bring its popular Monster Strike game to China. This is one example of Tencent’s efforts to gain recognition as an app distribution platform. Although it requires localization changes, the Japan’s popular mobile games have good chances to do well in China. I think more and more Chinese platforms will actively try to partner with Japanese game developers in the future.

  1. You may remember my report on HAXLR8R, the Shenzhen accelerator specializing in hardware startups. ↩

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WeChat’s new mobile game GunZ Dash is a really fun rip-off

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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One of the more interesting aspects of the mobile messaging space, particularly here in Asia with Line, WeChat/Weixin, and KakaoTalk, is the games that they offer users. Given that WindRunner [1] has been a popular game on both the Line and Kakao platforms (see our past review from last February), it makes sense that China’s Tencent – a company known to occasionally copy from others [2] — would try to follow their lead. That looks to be the intention behind GunZ Dash, a new mobile game launched on January 7, the global/English version of its Chinese language game Tiantian Kupao released back in September 2013. In terms of gameplay, GunZ Dash is virtually identical to WindRunner, as you can see in our comparison video above. While it doesn’t surprise me that Tencent would release a Chinese-language copycat of a game, I’m a little surprised that they’d roll this title out to their global users too. But because WindRunner is such a good game, GunZ Dash is really fun too because it is a really quality copy. The Chinese version of the game has been among China’s top five grossing iOS apps since its release (see chart below), so clearly its…

One of the more interesting aspects of the mobile messaging space, particularly here in Asia with Line, WeChat/Weixin, and KakaoTalk, is the games that they offer users. Given that WindRunner [1] has been a popular game on both the Line and Kakao platforms (see our past review from last February), it makes sense that China’s Tencent – a company known to occasionally copy from others [2] — would try to follow their lead.

That looks to be the intention behind GunZ Dash, a new mobile game launched on January 7, the global/English version of its Chinese language game Tiantian Kupao released back in September 2013.

In terms of gameplay, GunZ Dash is virtually identical to WindRunner, as you can see in our comparison video above. While it doesn’t surprise me that Tencent would release a Chinese-language copycat of a game, I’m a little surprised that they’d roll this title out to their global users too. But because WindRunner is such a good game, GunZ Dash is really fun too because it is a really quality copy.

The Chinese version of the game has been among China’s top five grossing iOS apps since its release (see chart below), so clearly its copy-to-China strategy is a smart one from a business perspective. But it’s interesting to see a copy-to-China game now being marketed abroad. As far as I can recall, that hasn’t happened so much in the past.

But Tencent has marketed WeChat in a number of Southeast Asian nations, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand, so maybe those are the gamers they are trying to attract here. Tencent will continue to do well pushing its services in emerging markets especially, continuing to mask that its services are made-in-China.

So where am I going with all this? Speaking in very general terms, I guess I’m just a little discouraged that one of China’s biggest internet success stories is such a ‘me-too’ company. As big as Tencent is, not many in the international media pay attention to it, and perhaps that’s why they can continue to do this sort of thing.

Up-and-coming companies like Xiaomi are a little more inspiring for the nation’s entrepreneurs, even with their don’t-call-me-Steve-Jobs/ dressed-just-like-Steve-Jobs CEO.

Tencent and WeChat will no doubt continue to thrive. But I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan.

wechat-gunz-dash

  1. Developed by Korean gaming company WeMade.  ↩

  2. And by occasionally copy, I actually mean build an internet empire by copying everything it can.  ↩

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  3. mr-egg-wide WeChat turns to Japanese startup Quan for mobile sticker content

WeChat turns to Japanese startup Quan for mobile sticker content

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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Japanese startup Quan announced today that it has partnered with Chinese internet giant Tencent to provide stamp content within the latter’s WeChat mobile messaging app, starting today. The first set of stamps will be a Mr. Egg character set, downloadable for free from within the chat application (pictured below). Quan has built an interesting business model on top of cute, exportable Japanese content. It’s very much the same flavor of content that has led to the global success of other cute Japanese apps such as CocoPPa or Decopic. But in addition to its ‘kawaii’ appeal, Quan is riding the message app wave, with its app myStickerShop and other sticker-related business. Currently, when it comes to chat-related content, Quan has over 200 characters under its belt. Recently the company has been focused on obtaining licenses for even more, which should help solidify its reputation as the go-to company for this kind of mobile content. Readers may recall that we interviewed the company’s CEO Kazuhiro Mizuno earlier in the year about his company’s business in Thailand, including a tie-up with the nation’s largest mobile operator, AIS. They plan to establish a subsidiary in Thailand by the end of the year. As for…

mr-egg-wide

Japanese startup Quan announced today that it has partnered with Chinese internet giant Tencent to provide stamp content within the latter’s WeChat mobile messaging app, starting today. The first set of stamps will be a Mr. Egg character set, downloadable for free from within the chat application (pictured below).

Quan has built an interesting business model on top of cute, exportable Japanese content. It’s very much the same flavor of content that has led to the global success of other cute Japanese apps such as CocoPPa or Decopic. But in addition to its ‘kawaii’ appeal, Quan is riding the message app wave, with its app myStickerShop and other sticker-related business.

Currently, when it comes to chat-related content, Quan has over 200 characters under its belt. Recently the company has been focused on obtaining licenses for even more, which should help solidify its reputation as the go-to company for this kind of mobile content.

Readers may recall that we interviewed the company’s CEO Kazuhiro Mizuno earlier in the year about his company’s business in Thailand, including a tie-up with the nation’s largest mobile operator, AIS. They plan to establish a subsidiary in Thailand by the end of the year.

As for Tencent, this is not the first time that it has turned to Japanese expertise to improve its mobile offerings. The company previously enlisted Japan-based Nanameue Inc to develop its MotionPics Maker app for WeChat.

mr-egg2 mr-egg-1

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