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At first, I didn’t really see the appeal of the Sugr Cube. Or portable wifi speakers in general, for that matter. Now, after spending some time with the device, I’ve come to appreciate the value of taking your music around with you. But is this tasty little music box worth its hefty US$199 price tag? That depends.

First impressions and setup

In terms of packaging, Sugr Cube really leaves nothing to be desired. It comes in the classy-looking and sturdy black box pictured above, and inside that box is a tasteful presentation of everything you’ll ever need relating to Sugr Cube: the speaker itself, one USB cable, two charger plugs, and an outlet adapter for every kind of power outlet I’ve ever seen on my travels throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. The Sugr Cube is portable in the global sense – it comes with the tools you’d need to plug this thing in anywhere.

It also comes, of course, with setup instructions for the speaker, and the process is remarkably simple. Download the Sugr Cube app to your phone (there are Android and iOS versions), enter your local wifi password, follow a few simple steps, and you’ll be all synced up and ready to rock. The entire process took me two minutes, if that.

As far as the hardware quality goes, Sugr says the device is handcrafted, and I believe them. The speaker casing is made with real wood that looks great, and the whole thing feels very solid. The startup behind the gadget is based in China, the US, and Norway, and you get the feeling that cross-border cooperation has helped ensure that the Sugr Cube includes sleek design inflences from all over the world.

It has also been designed with simplicity in mind – aside from a volume dial and a microUSB port on the back, there’s not a button anywhere on the device.

What the Sugr Cube can do

The Sugr Cube’s claim to fame – and the reason why it can get away with having so few buttons – that it’s touch sensitive. You can tap the top of the speaker to toggle Pause/Play, and tilting it 45 degrees left or right will skip to the previous and next tracks, respectively. If you want to see this in action, you can check out a quick video I made below, but this video comes with an important note: you’ll hear the music skip once but that was not common during my time with the Sugr Cube. It was probably just a glitch in my home wifi (which has been causing some problems for me recently).

These features are cool, but they do take some getting used to. Especially if you’ve got the speaker playing while moving it around, you’re probably going to confuse yourself by accidentally tapping or tipping it and pausing or skipping without actually meaning to at first. And to be honest, I do wonder whether the touch features are really worth the expense they probably added to the device. Tapping the top of the Cube to pause and tilting to skip is a neat party trick, but once you get over the novelty of it, it’s not any easier or faster than pushing a traditional play or pause button.

Of course, more important than how the speaker operates is what it can play. And with Sugr Cube, the answer is basically everything. In the mobile app itself, you’ve got the option to stream from Pandora and Spotify, or tune in to streaming radio from China’s Douya or any of the dozens of stations available in the app (including numerous BBC stations, Talksport, Jazz FM, KISS, and many more).

The Sugr Cube app streaming Pandora (left) and playing a radio station (right).

But the Sugr Cube also supports AirPlay, which means that these days, you can use almost anything to stream music to it. You can stream your iTunes library, or all of the audio from your Mac. You can stream from apps like Soundcloud and QQ Music. I’m even able to stream music to the Sugr Cube using the my music app of choice for Android, which is DoubleTwist. All of the music that I have and want to listen to across my various devices, I can get to stream on the Sugr Cube quite easily.

You can also load up to 4 GB of music onto the Sugr Cube itself via its internal flash memory, and control playback via the app or using the touch controls. You won’t even need to plug anything in; you can transfer music to the Sugr Cube remotely from your phone inside the Sugr Cube app (supposedly you can also do this remotely via PC or Mac computers, but I couldn’t get that to work). Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to organize your stored music into playlists, or even to shuffle it instead of playing it in sequence.

How it sounds

The obvious downside of the Sugr Cube, of course, is that there’s only one speaker. That means that you’re getting mono sound rather than stereo. You can get proper stereo sound if you pair two Sugr Cubes together, but as I only have one, I wasn’t able to test this. In any event, buying two of these things would be a pretty expensive proposition.

I was really impressed with the Sugr Cube’s sound quality given its size, though. I’m no audio expert, but everything I streamed through the speaker sounded clear and crisp, and most importantly it wasn’t lacking in the low-end. Obviously you’re not going to get the same kind of bass out of this thing that you’d get out of some monster subwoofer, but I doubt you’ll find another speaker this size that boasts better bass, either. I found it did a good job with everything from the quiet subtleties of Iron and Wine’s “Upward Over the Mountain” to the pumping new-age G-funk of Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta.”

It can also get pretty damn loud. To an extent, this depends on the source it’s working with – I wasn’t impressed with the volume output when streaming from my DoubleTwist library – but with the right source this thing bumps. Playing Pandora at top volume was loud enough to fill a large room and then some.

The portability factor

The Sugr Cube with an apple for scale.

As I said, I wasn’t really sold on the concept of portable wifi speakers, but as luck would have it, the day I opened the Sugr Cube, I also undertook a little home improvement project. This project necessitated me moving a few times between one room, another room, and the basement so that I could fish a cable through the wall of one room, under the floor, and up into another room. I like to work with a little music, and the Sugr Cube was perfect for this task – I could carry it around from place to place easily, with no need for any wires or plugs. And my music continued to stream seamlessly even when I was walking. The device’s small size and portability made the task more bearable, and I began to see how it could be nice to have even if you’ve got a nice set of wired speakers or headphones in your home.

Of course, the Sugr Cube isn’t wireless all of the time; it does need to be plugged in every so often to charge its 6,000 mAh battery. A full charge can get you around seven hours of music, according to the Sugr folks, and my experience aligns with that. Total battery life might depend a bit on what you’re streaming and at what volume, but you can definitely get quite a few hours of tunes out of the thing without needing to plug it in.

Is it worth it?

Now we come to the toughest question to answer about the Sugr Cube: is it worth it? One the one hand, it’s an excellent portable wifi speaker that can stream almost anything you throw at it. On the other hand, it’s priced at US$199 (and that’s a sale price), which seems like an awful lot to spend for sound that isn’t even in stereo.

Given the build quality, the touch features, and the impressive sound (for the size) reproduction, it’s hard for me to say that Sugr Cube isn’t worth US$200. But I do wonder if that pricing could be a problem. Are users looking for a portable wifi speaker really so concerned with quality that they’ll be willing to shell out that much when there are decent budget options also available? And will the high-end sound freaks who don’t balk at spending US$200 on audio gear still be interested such a small speaker that only produces mono sound?

I can’t answer either of those questions, so I’ll just say this: if you’re looking for a high-end portable wifi speaker, the Sugr Cube will not disappoint. The build quality is excellent, the sound is impressive given the source, and the gadget will stream audio from just about anything you can throw at it. You can certainly find cheaper ways to play your tunes via wifi, but if you don’t need to find a cheaper option I’m sure you’ll find the Sugr Cube to be as sweet as I did.

This post Sugr Cube review: that sweet, sweet melody appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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According to entrepreneur Josh Steimle, sometimes we assume, without considering all the options, that a pivot means changing our product when all we need is to tweak the marketing

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, or so the saying goes. Many entrepreneurs have become enamoured with the word ‘pivot’ over the past few years, using it as something of a badge of honor. For example: “Yeah, we started out with a fintech SaaS (Software as a Service) offering for investment banking, but now we’ve pivoted into a healthcare app.” Using the word ‘pivot’ is how you sound cool when admitting what you were doing wasn’t working.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using the word pivot, but there are good pivots and bad pivots.

In the business classic Think And Grow Rich, author Napoleon Hill tells the story of a miner who dug himself into debt trying to find a vein of gold he was convinced existed on his property. The vein was there, but the miner stopped digging three feet short of reaching it and left to do something else. Bad pivot.

Sometimes we assume, without considering all the options, that a pivot means changing our product. “Customers don’t like what we’re selling, so we need to sell something else,” an entrepreneur might think.

But what if it isn’t that complicated? What if the solution isn’t to change what you’re selling, but how you’re selling it? Here are three case studies of entrepreneurs who achieved success not by pivoting their products, but by making relatively small and simple changes to their marketing.

S’well

When Sarah Kauss created the S’well bottle – a dual lined, stainless steel bottle that keeps liquids warm for up to 12 hours and cold for up to 24 hours (without any condensation forming on the outside), she formed a charity partnership framework, donating a portion of the proceeds. This became the primary focus of the marketing on the website, but sales weren’t as brisk as she would have liked.

Also Read: In photos: On the ground as Taiwan Startup Stadium pivots

“Of course, people liked the charitable aspect of what we were doing, but we found that it wasn’t a primary force when it came to making a decision to buy,” Kauss says. “People were buying because they loved the product.”

Kauss decided to focus on the unique design and quality of the bottle. Soon thereafter the product caught the attention of Oprah’s O Magazine and a mention there led to deals with various retailers, including Starbucks which now carries S’well products in thousands of its stores. That’s good for both S’well and the charities it supports.

Ravean

Ravean is an apparel startup currently marketing its product, heated hoodies and jackets, through a Kickstarter campaign. Initially, the company marketed its products towards three broad groups: skiing, camping and outdoor enthusiasts generally.

“The response was terrible,” says Co-founder Bryce Fisher. “We pivoted by making our marketing location based within these same categories, but still got a very mild response.” While lots of people were seeing online ads the company placed and visiting its Kickstarter page, very few were committing to fund the project.

“We realised we had to target the people who already knew what Kickstarter was,” Fisher says. “This small change brought back two-three times ROI (return of investment) on our money, and then we began to split test by age, gender, and location, raising the ROI five times.”

Ravean started out with a goal to raise US$100,000 through its Kickstarter campaign, but it has blown past that, raising over US$1 million.

SODO

SODO makes high-end athletic clothing. The standard operating procedure for an athletic apparel company is to gather celebrity athlete endorsements to give the brand credibility and drive awareness and sales.

“We believed that paid athlete endorsements would be the key that would allow us to scale rapidly, just as it had for other brands like Nike, Adidas and Under Armour,” says Mark Nelson, Founder and CEO of SODO. “We engaged a lot of pro athletes by sending them gear to try out, and we got good feedback and started negotiating endorsement contracts, but as we spoke with the athletes’ agents and attorneys we started feeling like we were losing the sense of authenticity we had gotten from the athletes when they weren’t being paid.”

Also Read: From Archives: Failure is fast becoming a badge of honour for Indian entrepreneurs

The SODO team started to wonder if perhaps it was a better statement of quality if it didn’t pay athletes to wear the clothing, but they wore it anyway.

SODO decided to change its strategy and now has over 40 pro athletes working behind the scenes to help it develop and refine the product. It has been able to save a lot of cash by deciding to not go down the endorsement road, yet sales are going strong with the clothing line available at select Nordstrom and REI stores, elite gyms, and the SODO Drop Shop, its mobile e-tail unit.

The lesson from each of these three examples is that when your business isn’t finding success, look for something small and easy you can modify, rather than assuming large, disruptive changes are necessary. Perhaps the simplest change is the right one, and you’re just a few feet away from striking gold.

The article Pivot Your Marketing Instead Of Your Product first appeared on Forbes/ Entrepreneurs.

The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, please send us an email at writers[at]e27[dot]co

Image Credit: Peshkova/Shutterstock

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The sink-or-swim, fix-or-fail world of tech startups has had its ups and downs this year; we look back on the wins and losses in the ecosystem

Image Credit: Shutterstock

The tech startup ecosystem is, as Aldous Huxley (referencing Shakespeare) says, a brave, new world. Each week could bring a new innovation that could change the way the world does things and, hopefully, make the people who came up with it some money.

Unfortunately, it is not a world made up exclusively of uplifting success stories and happy endings. Promises can be broken and expectations might end up unmet.

We have compiled a list of this year’s hits and misses in tech startups as a sober reminder of the year that is about to end, and as a guide for 2016, which will undoubtedly have its own stories of heartbreak and happiness.

1. E-commerce and China Singles’ Day

Image Credit: Tmall

This can be said for e-commerce in general this year, but China’s Singles’ Day has transformed from a sort of reverse Valentine’s Day to a shopping event that e-commerce companies have fallen in love with.

In 2015, sales on Alibaba hit US$5 billion in the first 90 minutes of the massive sale event, with sales at US$11.29
billion by the evening of November 11.

Rival JD.com was shy with details, but gleefully announced over Twitter that it had “topped our 2010 sales in 2 mins after midnight, 2011 sales in 15 mins, and 2012 sales in 36 mins.”

It has also crossed borders, with Flipkart in India taking advantage of November 11 falling on the same day as an ongoing sale for Diwali. In Southeast Asia, Groupon, Lazada and Zalora launched similar promotions.

But e-commerce sales promotions are not limited to Singles’ Day, with Indonesia’s Harbolnas (National Online Shopping Day) on December 12 had 140 e-commerce companies participating, up from just 70 in 2014.

2. Ride-sharing regulation

Ride-sharing services like Uber and GrabCar will soon no longer operate in the grey areas of public transportation, with guidelines already in place in the Philippines and in Jakarta, Indonesia. While this may mean hassles in the short-term, government recognition and regulation is expected to mean better service for commuters.

Regulation has seen some hitches, with Uber, for example, getting scolded by the Governor of Jakarta for saying that he has allowed Uber to operate there.

Both sides have made clear that Uber, and rival GrabTaxi, will need to comply with government guidelines before they are given the green light to operate.

Uber has also opened an office in Central Jakarta after registering as a foreign investment company. Prior to this, Uber said, it did not earn anything from operations in the Republic.

A Philippine court has also ordered a temporary halt on accepting more registrations for Uber and GrabCar units after a group of regular taxi and van operators filed a petition saying the new category of public-utility vehicle has cost them half their income. If the mad rush for cars in Metro Manila, and surge pricing of around 2.2x, this month is any indication, however, the megacity needs more ride-sharing cars, not more.

3. Fintech

Image Credit: Shutterstock

There is money to be made in money, it seems. This year saw Indonesian government-owned Bank Mandiri set up a VC with US$37 million in funds to invest in fintech startups.

“Seeing the potential of local startups in developing e-cash businesses, we just cannot wait to start investing in them,” says Budi G Sadikin, Managing Director of Bank Mandiri.

Meanwhile, Amar Bank, also in Indonesia, is trying to become the country’s first fully-digital bank. Run as a “startup” under the corporate Tolaram Group, Amar Bank’s Tunaiku brand deals with loans, applications for which can be processed online.

In Korea, Kakao and KT have already been granted licences to run Internet-only banks.

4. On-demand services

Many in Asia do not have the time or energy to look for and screen service providers, much less perform the tasks that they want to hire house cleaners and handymen to do.

From beautician booking services to ones that help you get the laundry done, on-demand service startups have been popping and many are getting funding. India’s Housejoy, for example, has just closed a US$22.4M Series B led by Amazon.

The trend has become a boon for customers who can be assured of getting their chores done by skilled and trustworthy providers and for those in the service industry who want to make some extra cash.

Also Read: 10 consumer tech trends that will define 2016

Misses

1. Foodtech in India and Vietnam

Although it hasn’t quite gone sour yet, food tech has seen a lot of layoffs, especially in India, where Zomato and TinyOwl have laid off almost 300 employees. Those in the space say the layoffs are due to foodtech being a very complex vertical.

“You can do so many things so differently in this space — for [example], you can have your own kitchen or you can list others, you can sell Indian cuisines or hundreds of other possible cuisine options, you can do delivery on your own or give it to third-party firms, you can make it a daily meal platform or premium food platform. The
possible combinations are endless and that makes it tough to crack,” says Kumar Setu, Co-founder of Petoo, a quick-service restaurant that can track customers’ food habits and order volumes.

Investments are still coming in and the dine-out market is expected to grow in coming years, but those who have lost their jobs have certainly left with a bitter taste in their mouths.

Rocket Internet’s foodpanda Vietnam has, meanwhile, been sold to rival Vietnammm. Although management issues may have more to do with that than with customers losing their appetite for food delivery.

2. Pirate3D

Pirate3D Co-founders Brendan Goh and You Jun

Pirate3D, which was supposed to deliver a low-cost 3D printer to Kickstarter funders, is one of the notable failures of the year, with CEO Brendan Goh himself admitting that the company bit off more than it could chew.

“The product is a good product and [the media] appreciated it in the articles; it is just that we messed up in other areas of the business,” he says in an interview with e27.

With funding coming in unpredictable spurts, it became difficult for Pirate3D to handle recurring expenses while also trying to keep the price of the product down.

Pirate3D is not giving up, however, Goh says, “[W]e need to go back to basics: Build a machine that we can sell well, generate profit for the company, and out of the profits, we will do the fulfillment. We need to look at this from the long-term point of view and not short-term, because if we do short-term, this issue will keep cropping up.”

3. Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC)

A file photo of Cheryl Yeoh, CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC).

Although MaGIC CEO Cheryl Yeoh, who announced her impending departure from the Malaysian Ministry of Finance-run agency this month, herself says she is not leaving because of pressure, as first reported in a Digital News Asia report, the loss of a CEO is always cause for concern.

Add to that the talk that the programme, which was geared to support ethnic Malay entrepreneurs, had been criticised for having someone who is not an ethnic Malay at the helm and for focussing on tech.

“There was no ‘mounting pressure’ at all. The Board meets quite frequently and we always tell [them] what we are going to do and they are fully supportive of our plans. There has not been any push-back to focus on other types of entrepreneurship,” Yeoh insists.

A recent piece on e27 argues that Yeoh’s departure is not so much a loss for startups in Malaysia because “[t]he Malaysian ecosystem is not simply MaGIC, there is a diverse set of people working to support entrepreneurship in the country. It is high time to empower the people who value performance, sustainabilty and growth
projections over the ethnic background of the founding team.”

4. Li-Fi, the ‘Wi-Fi killer’

Lester Balajadia / Shutterstock

This is less a miss for the technology, which is supposed to transmit data through light, and more one for the tech press, which reported the development as one that will shake a world that relies heavily on Wi-Fi.

As has been repeatedly pointed out, the infant technology has to surmount many challenges, and there is only “one place to use Li-Fi in its current iteration: one cold dark room filled with LED lights.”

In any case, for many parts of Southeast Asia, just getting electricity is still a problem and so is getting reliable Wi-Fi connections.

Also Read: 5 things that you won’t see happening in technology in 2016

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Together with ‘gemstones’ and ‘pinch cake’, the startup is indeed an inseparable part of Indonesians’ life

Google’s Year in Search 2015 report has arrived.

While Singapore’s top trending Google searches got e27 wondering what this thing actually is, Indonesia’s top trending Google searches proved that a certain tech startup had managed to get Indonesians’ attention and trigger their curiosity.

Of the three top trending searches, the second position is held by motorbike taxi-hailing app Go-Jek, while the third position is held by ‘kue cubit’ (a kind of sweet dessert), and ‘batu akik’ (rings adorned by gemstones typically worn by middle-aged gentlemen, as popularised by former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono).

According to Putri Silalahi, Head of Communications Google Indonesia, this year’s top trend searches in Indonesia are strongly related to daily activities. However, daily activities between each age group varies, leading to diverse sub-searches for each topic.

“For example, I am searching for ‘kue cubit’ to find out which outlet has the tastiest cake, while my mother would look for its recipe,” she explained as quoted by Kompas Tekno.

Also Read: Google and Indosat seal Project Loon deal

Trending searches are also affected by events happening at the moment. In April, one day before the National Examination day for junior and high school students, search for ‘prayer for success in National Examination’ peaked between afternoon to midnight.

Google also released a special category for Indonesia, which is the top trending searches as conducted via smartphone. The special category has been created based on significant increase of smartphone users in the country.

“Those searches are ‘how-to’ articles, beauty and fashion news, and memes,” revealed Silalahi.

Enjoy 2-for-1 tickets to Echelon Indonesia 2016 now. Do not miss out on Indonesia’s biggest international tech conference!

The post Go-Jek scores Indonesia’s top trending searches in Google. No surprises there! appeared first on e27.

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The startup, based in London, runs a stock market prediction app that hands out cash for good calls

Image Credit: Bacho / Shutterstock

Previously based in Tokyo and recently relocated to London, financial technology startup Nous Global Markets has announced receiving US$750,000 in funding from angel investors, venture capitalists, and others from crowdfunding efforts.

Founded in 2012, the startup launched Spark Profit, a free-to-play virtual trading game app in January 2014, and was reported by e27 to have awarded US$15,000 to beta users worldwide.

The game app lets people predict future market movements with the incentive of earning cash when their predictions are proven correct.

Also Read: StockRadars raises funding from CyberAgent Ventures and East Ventures

Justin Short, CEO, Nous, told this author that the app has garnered 315,000 users and awarded users with US$236,000 in prizes to date.

Nous will use the latest injection of funds to launch a new trading app, which will target people who want to trade their own money within Spark Profit. The app is expected to go live in Q1 2016.

“It’s a little early to go into all the details of the for-money version of Spark Profit but we’re certain it will be the simplest, safest and most fun way for anyone starting to trade as a serious hobby,” he said to e27.

Short also highlighted that while the team is based out of London, majority of Spark Profit users are still from Asia.

“… In fact, the Philippines will be the go-to market for our next app, coming in Q1 2016,” he said, adding that 20 per cent of users are from the Southeast Asian country.

The post Nous Global Markets grabs US$750K in funding; targets Philippines appeared first on e27.

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