WE ARE SOCIAL ASIA TUESDAY TUNE UP #274

Tuneup
kristie.neo

By Erasmus Ess, Ayeshah Mirzha, Kristie Neo

Nasi Lemak Burger 2.0
In Singapore, nothing gets your blood going like a little national rivalry  – especially when it involves food. Case in point: McDonalds Singapore. The fast food chain recently launched the Nasi Lemak burger, which did so well that it sold out nationwide in a span of 2 weeks. But Malaysia was determined not to go down without a fight. MacDee Malaysia may not have had a similar burger, so myBurgerLab decided to up the stakes with their own spin on a local favourite.



Aside from boasting an admittedly delicious sounding burger, myBurgerLab knew EXACTLY how to get interest, quick. They brought out the national flag, made a dig at Singapore, and Twitterverse did the rest.


It’s formulaic to some degree, but it works. And despite all the rivalry between the two countries – it’s safe to say that we’re all winners here – nobody’s going to complain about having more delicious food, are they?



Tencent and QQ develop an advanced face recognition app which locates missing children in China
If you’ve got the right kind of tech-know how and something like 861 million active monthly users at your disposal, you can quite possible come up with a digital solution to a social problem. In this case, it’s missing children.
Called QQ Alert, the face recognition app taps on big data and deep learning to locate children gone missing in China. The technology it relies on is impressive – it’s able to process 50 million photos per second, with an accuracy of 99.8% through deep learning analysis. To date, QQ Alert has helped locate 176 children out of the 286 notices put up for missing people, and has won Tencent its first Cannes Gold Lions Award. Find out more about how it works here.




Sarahah the anonymous messaging app takes phones by storm
Sarahah is something like a cross between Secret Pen Pal and Whatsapp. It’s a messaging app which allows you to leave anonymous messages on your friend’s profiles. Once you’ve registered for a Sarahah account, a profile link is assigned to you which can be shared with friends or publicly. Anyone with access to the link is allowed to leave messages on the page. The app however, doesn’t allow users to reply to these messages. The app has been quite a hit so far. Sarahah is currently the no 1 downloaded free app on iTunes, and is available on both iOS and Android.