Regional venture capitalist AsiaTech Ventures is involved in another Internet play, a portal that focuses on English-speaking Asians called Click2Asia.com.
The new portal will be jointly launched in October by KoreaLink.com, a Korean online community in North America, and the Asian Buying Consortium (ABC), an Internet membership based discount purchasing club which is also in AsiaTech’s fund portfolio.
Joseph Cheon, founder of KoreaLink.com and CEO of Click2Asia.com, indicated that the synergy of ABC’s extensive relationships in the Asian Pacific American community and marketing expertise and KoreaLink.com’s online community building experience will enable Click2Asia.com to expand among the English-speaking Asian audience.
KoreaLink.com has 150,000 registered Korean members in North America and 500,000 unique monthly visitors.
ABC brings to the relationship its membership base and strategic alliances through AsiaTech Ventures. Among other incentives, ABC can provide members of Click2Asia with discounts on products and services, including long distance, travel and wireless services, as well as free trial issues and subscription rate discounts on popular Asian-American publications.
Besides AsiaTech Ventures, Click2Asia.com has decent pedigree of investors and board members, including StarTV’s chairman Gareth Chang, Kingston Technology co-founder John Tu, SRS Labs chairman Thomas Yuen, and AST Research co-founder K.H. Wun.
The founders of Click2Asia.com say that the portal will seek to solidify market dominance in the English speaking Asian community that includes 11 million Asians in the U.S. and 3 million in Canada.
“As the Asian online market expands, Click2Asia.com will look to raise significantly more funds to acquire and partner with local in-language sites in each major country to extend its presence and unite all Asians globally,” said Gareth Chang, StarTV chairman and Click2Asia.com’s advisory board chairman.
“It has been difficult for mainstream portals and Web sites to target this growing and important online segment, but with Click2Asia.com’s expertise and dedicated Asian focus, we believe it will be able to clearly command this space,” said James Yao of AsiaTech Ventures.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, the new portal will officially launch in October with additional regional Asian sites planned.
