Melbourne, Australia – 24 November 2010 – Club Intimate announced today it has won the 2010 Red Herring Asia Top 100 Tech Startup Award. Club Intimate was initially selected as a finalist for this award in October 2010. Following the presentation by Club Intimate’s Founder & CEO, Arshad Khan in Shanghai, Red Herring announced its Top 100 Asia Award in recognition of the leading private companies from Asia, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

“We are quite thrilled and proud of our accomplishment”, said Arshad Khan. “Winning of this ward was no easy task; Club Intimate was selected as a winner from hundreds of companies across Asia. Attending the event also gave me the opportunity to meet the brightest and smartest entrepreneurs from Asia”.

Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego has just released a very interesting report entitled ‘How Much Information? A Report on American Consumers.’ This report looks at how much information Americans consume across all forms of media.

The report says, ‘In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totalled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.

Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. Even though the calls are free, they are really excellent in quality. If you and your friends are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype today. Every day, people everywhere also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles.

Since recently, eBay had controlling interest in Skype. On 19 November 2009, eBay announced the sale of Skype in a deal valuing the business at $2.75 billion. The buyer, who will control an approximately 70 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Joltid Limited and certain affiliated parties, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz.

Sean Parker, Managing Partner of Founder’s Fund, gave a presentation entitled “The New Era of The Network Service” at Web 2.0 Summit 2009. In his presentation, Sean tries to prove the point that in the next decade ‘network services’ like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin will dominate the World Wide Web as compare to ‘information services’ like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I totally agree with Sean on this. Whilst there will always bee a need for information and data, the real value is provided to people by providing platforms that help connect people and build relationships. This is the core value of Club Intimate as well.