Gothere.sg - Helping Singapore Find Its Way The Gothere.sg team: (Left to right) Dominic Ee, Toh Kian Khai, Kuan Chih Yuan and Ang Jun Han. Dominic Ee, Toh Kian Khai, Kuan Chih Yuan and Ang Jun Han are avid football fans, but that’s not what keeps them up late at night. They are the team behind one of Singapore’s most  promising startups gothere.sg, a location-based service provider whose map and directional search engine is steadily becoming the quintessential service for finding your way around Singapore. I first came across gothere.sg when I saw them in a startup pitch at UnConference 2008, and they were one of few startups present that stood out in the crowd. I managed to finally grab hold of Toh Kian Khai, gothere.sg’s Director for Business Development, at this year’s UnConference for this interview. Kian Khai, an FC Barcelona fan, tells me that the team was initially inspired to start gothere.sg when they were looking around at the other online navigation websites available to help commuters in Singapore, and thought that they could make a better service. “We wanted to improve the whole user experience of locating services and traveling to destinations,” remembers Kian Khai, a graduate from the National University of Singapore with an honors degree in Economics. He says that his partners have been instrumental in putting the gothere.sg’s core services together. “(Director of Technology) Dominic developed the infrastructure and is responsible for conceptualizing new products and research of the latest technologies. (Director of Engineering) Chih Yuan handles the technical requirements of projects to deliver results to clients, while (Director of Products) Junhan looks at creating innovative products and overlooking the development of new products as well as the improvement of existing products and services.” In case you wanted to know, Dominic supports Italian Serie A team Inter Milan, Chih Yuan is a fan of English Premier League side Newcastle FC, while Junhan backs its rival Arsenal FC. Learning From The Best The gothere.sg team believes the site’s user interface is their best unique selling point (USP), and it’s obvious that the guys have learnt some lessons from Google. After all, one of the reasons for the search giant’s ascendence in its earlier days was the fact that its user-interface was clean and simple and thus user-friendly, compared to the clunky crowded home pages of its key competitors. It’s the same with gothere.sg. “We love our user interface, and many of our users love it too. It’s the ease of use that keeps people coming back. We would of course like everyone living and visiting Singapore to use our services,” says Kian Khai.  The key challenge, he says, for any startup is to get its brand name out there, and in order to do that you need a good product and a good marketing plan. “Currently, we are targeting net-savvy people between 15 to 35 years old. I believe they will be our ambassadors to the rest of the population who do not use the Internet as much.” Finding the right partners and building more content are key parts of their growth strategy. “Hungrygowhere.com is one of our partners who provide their content on our website, and we are looking for more partners to provide their content through us,” says Kian Khai. gothere.sg recently released its Gothere Maps APIs, which will allow developers to build other interesting applications on its maps. “We will be promoting both the free and paid version, over the next few months,” says Kian Khai. ”We have always wanted to bring our services onto the mobile platform as we believe our services is even more useful for people on the go.” “We will not forget our users, so we are also looking at further improvements to the site.” However, Kian Khai laments that it’s increasingly difficult to get potential clients to spend during this current recession.  “Even before the recession, we have been very careful about our operating costs.” When asked about the lawsuit the Singapore Land Authority slapped on Streetdirectory.com in early 2008 for copyright infringement, Kian Khai assures me that it won’t happen to gothere.sg (they don’t build their services on SLA maps). “A lawsuit is always a potential risk for any business, it’s definitely detrimental to any company’s reputation and resources, but I do not see us getting involved in one.” A Journey, Not Just A Destination Kian Khai relates that their journey to date has been nothing short of exciting. “From the initial launch, to the redesign, launching our own maps, and getting ourselves mentioned in the Budget speech, these were major milestones for our company,” he says.   “Starting your own business is a lot of hard work. Passion, perseverance and diligence will bring you a long way on this path,” shares Kian Khai. “We took this road knowing the risks but we dream of having our own company, making useful products for people out there. We’re still very grateful to the people who (have helped make) it possible.” gothere.sg’s success to date is nothing short of amazing, considering the fact that they started out without any support from any of the local startup funding schemes offered by the local government (the founders have personally invested $80,000 into the business so far). “(But) we’re in the process of applying for funding from some government agencies,” says Kian Khai. The four co-founders are running the show and have not hired any staff yet. Someone in the industry shared an interesting story that emerged regarding that Budget speech. gothere.sg was apparently involved in talks with a government agency for months, but without any result. Soon after getting mentioned by Minister of Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam, gothere.sg received a call from the self-same agency inviting them back for immediate renegotiations. Kian Khai sounded genuinely surprised when I tell him that many in the startup community consider them as hometown heroes. “Heroes, really? We’re pretty surprised to hear this but I think all startups deserve a pat on the back,” he answers sheepishly. ”We have benefited from other startups’ advice and experience so we look forward to contributing back to the community some day.” The truth is that gothere.sg has really done well despite all the odds against it, and it’s no wonder that the site has garnered the groundswell of support that it has gotten so far. In fact, I will argue that they help Singapore find its way around in more ways than one - they are a shining beacon, and a perfect example of how entrepreneurship in Singapore can be. MDA Misses The Mark At UnConference 2009 eJamming presenting during Unconference 2009 startup 10-minute pitching sessions How it has grown. UnConference Singapore, organized by e27, is literally growing from strength to strength. Last year’s UnConference featured just 17 startups, but Saturday’s event saw over 31 startups from 10 countries participating in what must be Singapore’s biggest and most highly-anticipated annual event for the local tech and web startup community. Not only has the event grown in size - over 400 delegates compared to almost 300 in 2008 - but the quality of startups that participated and pitched on Saturday has also risen. Bangkok-based online collaborative music platform eJamming and Singapore-based RF location-based technology provider Human Network Labs, for example, were startups that were extremely well-received by a judging panel and the audience. The event was kicked off by a keynote from Scott Rafer, CEO of Lookery, and followed by a panel discussion on “Innovation in Asia: Where is it heading?” with Rafer, co-founder of OpenWeb Asia Gang Lu, co-founder and CEO of Buzzcity Lai Kok Fung and Wong Hoong Ann, founder of HungryGoWhere.com. Despite it going off in a tangent due to some of the questions posed by a generally excellent moderator in Benjamin Joffe of +8*, the session went well and provided some insight into some the panelists’ experiences in the web, tech and mobile spaces. The biggest letdown of the entire UnConference, in my opinion, took place during the session after the panel discussion, presented by the Media Development Authority of Singapore. First, it didn’t help that many in the audience had seen that chest-beating presentation - the role and supposed successes of the agency’s Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Research & Development (R&D) Programme Office’s in helping to fund and guide Singapore-based startups - many times before in previous events. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that members of the audience started leaving just five minutes into the session (it is an UnConference after all, and people have the right to). The speaker, a relatively junior MDA executive, knew she was losing the crowd, and began to fumble. If she had managed to get any attention from the crowd, it was of the wrong kind. [ Picture removed by request.] Yes, the crowd was distracted by her legs that were just covered by a very short skirt. Not just pulses and heartbeats; even Twitter was aflutter. What would you have expected from a mainly-male geek audience in the consumer tech and web space? The lady seated next to me remarked that the speaker would have done better if she had “dressed a little more appropriately”. I trust my fellow delegate’s judgment - she was there at the UnConference to seek funding for her online fashion content publishing startup. Long legs aside, the key gripe would have been the fact that MDA seemed wholly incapable of defending its own programmes. It was obvious that she was clearly outmatched and overwhelmed by a knowledgeable audience. At one point, co-founder and CEO of Buzzcity Lai Kok Fung stood up and challenged her about their role as a facilitator in connecting Singapore startups to  larger, established companies such as Singtel as she claimed in her presentation. He argued, some will say rightly, that if a startup had a great product, Singtel would listen whether or not MDA was in the picture to facilitate any exchange. After some half-hearted defence by the MDA representative, Lai finally relented and remarked “I apologize for doing this to you, I should be taking this up with (MDA deputy CEO) Michael Yap instead”. I couldn’t but help notice some members of another government agency present (seated in the same row as me) rolling their eyeballs. UnConference 2009 is a once-a-year event when many of the best startups from Singapore and the region gather to share knowledge. It is also attended by those who finance startups - business angels, private equity fund managers, venture capitalists and the like - that the startup scene is eager to pursue, as well as educators, regulators, technology and web professionals and yes, aspiring entrepreneurs. In what must be considered a poorly-delivered presentation by a junior executive who isn’t empowered to answer and defend the agency’s role in the scheme of things, could MDA have erred by badly underestimating the nature and importance of UnConference, and the quality of its delegates, in the Singapore startup scene? Another question that begs asking: Is the agency fast enough to adapt and keep pace with the extremely fluid startup scene in Singapore? It has been almost three years since the IDM R&D Programme Office was set up in October 2006. Despite the many tweaks to its programmes over the past three years, some industry observers have privately commented that it may be losing its plot. Take for example, iJAM is a joke - I can’t put it any better than this poster. There is already talk that some local startups, attracted by better terms and cheaper costs, are strongly considering moving their operations to Malaysia. MDA’s IDM R&D Programme Office needs to seriously relook into its programmes, otherwise we may soon start to see a deluge of startups (and we don’t have many of these to start with in the first place) leaving our shores. Bear no misconceptions about this - members of Malaysia’s MDEC were present at the UnConference actively courting the startups. UnConference 2009 presented a perfect opportunity for MDA IDM R&D Programme Office to stand up and be a thought leader in the local startup community. It didn’t. All the more’s the pity. A Word from Matt Wilson, Co-Founder of Under30CEO.com Matt Wilson, founder of Under30CEO.com, created the world's No.1 Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization and was named National Student Leader of the Year. Young Upstarts focuses on people who are trying to change the world with their ideas, products and services. To do this Generation Y has to be resilient. Society shuts us down, so we have to surround ourselves with other go-getters. Entrepreneurs aren’t afraid of failure; they are afraid of what others are going to say. Finding the support system brings us one step closer to going out and doing what we love. Go out and make a difference, it’s the Young Upstarts way. *This is a guest post by Matt Wilson. Matt is a young entrepreneur and co-founder of Under30CEO.com, a social network for other young entrepreneurs. His mission is to lead people to go out and do something they are passionate about instead of falling into the rat race and playing by corporate America’s rules.  Under30CEO’s newsletter allows anyone to ask a business question and get answers from real people in their inbox or Twitter feed. He also runs a video podcast interviewing business experts who give lessons to business owners. Tempostand - Putting The Beat Into Indie Music The Tempostand team. Gaurav Dhobal and his mates Naman Arora, Rahul Tyagi, Aditya Thakur and Ujjwal Singh Grover were at a live event listening to a very young college band. The band was performing an original composition, and the friends were amazed by how good the band was. The music rocked, and the crowd obviously loved them. That set them wondering - how many such good musicians remained undiscovered? With that in mind, they conducted some research and found that while there was plenty of musical talent around, there wasn’t a proper platform to showcase them. So they made a business plan and, lo and behold, proceeded to win Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s Eureka International Business Plan competition in 2006. Tempostand was born - to give that platform for budding, talented musicians. Its target audience is mainly producers of fresh, new creative content and people interested in such content. “(But we hope to be) more than just a distribution platform for their work, we (also) want to be an agent for their economic empowerment,” says 25 year-old Gaurav, who graduated from Dhirubhai Institute of Information and Communication Technology in 2007 along with Naman, Ujjwal and Aditya. Rahul, also 25, is an Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee graduate. “We have a revenue sharing model with the artists and our efforts are to open up new revenue streams for them.” Engineering A Musical Platform They may all be engineering graduates, but at least one member of the team knows music - Aditya, 23, is himself a musician and has been part of a rock band for five years. 24 year-old Ujjwal is, however, the techhead in the team, while Rahul and Gaurav handles marketing and finance. Naman, 24, looks after public relations. Tempostand was started when they were in the final year of their graduation, so their college dorm in the Indian city of Ahmedabad was their office by default. Later they shifted to Gurgaon in Delhi simply because, Gaurav says, “it has a more vibrant music scene and houses major corporates”. Tempostand is totally bootstrapped and do not have any funding to date. Its current business model relies on two revenue sources - advertising and services. “Our online events, a kind of an online version of a reality show, are a big draw for sponsors and forms a chunk of our advertising revenues. We also create targeted events for companies,” Gaurav reveals. ”Then there are some new services like Musical Expressions, which allows anyone to get very personalized musical products as gifts or for different occasions.” Today, Tempostand’s greatest achievement is that its name has become synonymous with independent music in India. Its growth has been organic, attracting over 500 artists to work with them and more are added each week. “It’s not just about capturing (an audience),” says Gaurav, “at Tempostand an artist is recognized by his work and is not just another profile.” And The Award Goes To… Along the way, Tempostand has also won recognition and garnered various awards for their effort in supporting the burgeoning music scene in India. It was one of the finalists at the British Council’s Young Music Entrepreneur Award in India, as well as a finalist at I2i, the startup challenge held by Indian Institute of Management, Culcutta. But the team doesn’t intend to stop there. “We are planning to foray into other creative fields for example we recently launched our poets portal TempoPoets. This is in line with our bigger vision to become the ‘Republic of Creativity’ where Tempostand serves as a launch pad for new creative talent. Some new tools for music distribution are also planned for the coming year.” On Entrepreneurship “I love working on new ideas and so in a way starting something of my own was always on the cards. ‘Doing’ as opposed to just ‘thinking’ is what I believe defines entrepreneurship,” Gaurav shares. ”There is no perfect idea to start with; you make it perfect by working on it.” “And of course the most important thing is you should enjoy whatever you are doing.” SUPERMODELME.tv To Hit A Computer Screen Near You SUPERMODELME.tv - Thin and lights get on your thin-and-lights. Aspiring Asian supermodels are primed to hit the next thing closest to the big screen - on your computers. Singapore-based Refinery Media, a multimedia production agency has announced the launch of online reality show SUPERMODELME.tv – where ten models from across the Asian continent including Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and India will compete to be Asia’s next hottest face on runways and magazines. SUPERMODELME.tv will debut on 16 June 2009 and be broadcast online twice a week, stretching over 20 episodes. The online reality series will showcase the ups and downs that aspiring models encounter in their professional careers – from dealing with the thrilling and glamorous but unforgiving demands of the fashion industry, to the bonding sessions or brash disputes with the other models. Oone model is eliminated each week until the winning model is chosen out of the final three contestants. SUPERMODELME.tv will incorporate new online broadcast technologies such as Hyperspot, where users can have access to information on the brands, prices and stockist locations of the model’s outfits, and even the makeup and the names of their stylists, with a click of the mouse. Another is SubStream, a web-based subtitling technology that will allow viewers to easily switch from English to Mandarin subtitles while they watch the program. Helming SUPERMODELME.tv is Refinery Media founder, Karen Seah, who is a successful, established entrepreneur in the lifestyle and entertainment scene with several notable nightclub and restaurant outlets under her belt. Let’s all cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t turn out to be another mindless bimbofest like S Factor. Indochino - Online Retailer That Will Suit You Just Fine Indochino - Here's a suitor you can't resist. Buying a suit can be a frustrating experience, as Heikal Gani found out. Sure, you can put that down to the typical male’s lack of fashion sense, but Heikal realized it was more than that. He was buying his first suit for a conference when he recognized that like him, many other consumers were confused, intimidated and discouraged by offerings of traditional suit designers. With this thought in mind, Heikal recruited his best friend Kyle Vucko and founded online menswear retailer Indochino. The best pals initially met while studying at Canada’s University of Victoria - 28 year-old Heikal was doing a double major in psychology and political science while Kyle, 23, pursued a commerce degree. It was during their time in university when they wrote a business plan for an online menswear business a few semesters before graduation. “Our initial idea was to focus on a certain category of consumers who wants custom-made suits but realized that customers in general have a common pain point that it’s hard to get a well-fitting suit, with great style and even greater prices,” says Heikal, who is originally from Singapore. “We received a nod for angel investment soon after, and we decided to put school on hold and started our clothing venture. It was the best decision we ever made as students!” A Fitting Unique Selling Point Heikal reveals that Indochino’s unique single proposition to their customers is encompassed in their tagline, ‘we suit anyone’. “Men are generally frustrated by the textile industry - not being able to find suits that are well-fitted, well-styled and affordable. Indochino is able to custom make suit for any man, anywhere in the world.” “In addition, we have a great policy of giving free alterations just in case the suit needs tweaking at the local tailors. We also give free remakes and accept returns.” Needless to say, their target market are men who want to look and feel great in clothing, especially the 25-35 year-old five suit per week banker or office professional who needs to “look like a million dollars but makes a bit less than that”. “That being said, we really are focusing on making fashion and suits in general easier to buy and fit in for all men,” says Heikal. “This means really focusing on offering products that customers really want, and making the whole suit purchasing more simpler and accessible to the individual. We are also constantly expanding our style book or fashion resource section on the site and this is really helpful not only for our current clientele but anyone who needs styling advice particularly on formal wear or suits.” “At the end of the day, Indochino is a client-focused business.” “Recession has been a bonus for us.  People are looking for value and people who used to only buy US$1000 suits are trying us out.  They generally have been surprised by our quality and turnaround speed. We have also seen our sales ramping up for the past six months and correlated with the tough economic times.” The single largest purchase ever made on Indochino’s website was a guy who was so happy with his first purchase, he bought ten suits at US$3265 to fill his wardrobe. Perhaps he wasn’t planning to dryclean them too often. Suit tailor in China. Indochino is a registered entity in Canada’s Victoria, British Columbia, but its operations - website management, customer service, suit production, for example - is mostly based in Shanghai, China. Despite China’s, the Indochino team doesn’t think that China’s dubious reputation with product quality issues around the world affects their business. “(Doing) business in China is great! Very dedicated and hardworking staff, talented and ambitious people,” Heikal insists. The company currently has 8 full-time staff. Indochino is funded to a total of US$300,000 to date via angels and a venture capital firm. Its angel investors are the co-founders of Abebooks.com (one of the top 100 e-commerce companies) and a German investment firm, Acton Capital. Entrepreneurship Suits Them To A T When Heikal and Kyle first set out on the path of entrepreneurship, they, like most people, loved the idea of personal independence. “A few months with Indochino, boy, we realized, we did not think it through!” Heikal laughs. “The amount of work and hours that goes in are extra challenging, but these really are the only downsides.” “The blood, sweat and tears are all soon forgotten when more and more consumers are responding to your business.” The lesson they learnt? That you can achieve anything if you put your heart, soul and mind to it. “We feel very lucky to be able to do our own thing, at this age, building a fast-growing company against the backdrop of an exciting metropolitan city in Shanghai.” Innovative New Business Ideas To Beat The Recession Defy with recession with innovation. Trendwatching.com’s latest briefing “Innovation Jubilation” contains some great insights into innovation, and looks at over 50 interesting ideas to help spur your thinking about your new (or next) venture. Ideas I really like include FreePaperCups - paper cups with advertisements on them given to corporate customers to stock their pantries - and Hotel X, which outfits its rooms with refurbished furniture purchased from ordinary consumers. Save the environment, benefit consumers, and provide a new service? Sounds like a great idea to me! Trendwatching.com’s sister site Springwise.com is also a fabulous resource for new business ideas. If you’re in the business of creativity and ideas, you’d do well to have both sites in your RSS feeds. Lexani Limousines - Driving Its Way To The Top Billy Jinks - 20-year old CEO of Lexani Limousines Billy Jinks is the president and CEO of Lexani Limousines, a leader in Arizona’s transportation industry since 2004. Lexani Limousines is a full-service chauffer company that serves the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas, and features a diverse state-of-the-art fleet of luxury sedans, executive SUVs, limousines and coaches. Its client base range from business professionals and high net-worth individuals to corporate and hospitality accounts. What is interesting, however, is that Billy Jinks is just 20 years-old, and Lexani Limousines was started when he was only 15. So while most of Billy Jinks’ peers dream about owning a car, the young man has a whole fleet of them - 27 to be exact. Starting Young Billy had always wanted a career in the transportation business. As a five-year old, Billy developed a strong interest in limousines after riding in them to accompany his father on regular business trips to New York. When he was seven, he spent time with a family friend who owned a transportation company. Billy helped stock limousines with water bottles, and the limo drivers would tip him a dollar or two. Billy would attend limousine trade shows, developing more knowledge and insight into the chauffeuring industry than most adults in the business. Billy Jinks, in his early teens, inside one of his limos. All this while, Billy would learn about the business and how to run a business - so much so that many adults in the transportation business who spoke to Billy would comment that he knew more about limousines than anyone else they knew. The turning point came when Billy was 15. He somehow convinced his parents to use their credit to sign off on a commercial loan to help him purchase his first limousine, and established Lexani Limousines LLC in 2005. “I’ve known the ins and out of the limousine industry for years, so launching Lexani Limousines at an early age seemed like a natural fit,” says Billy. “Since I always knew this was the career path I would take, I decided to get started sooner rather than later to build a strong future for myself.” Defying the Odds According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only about five to ten percent of new small businesses survive its first five years. In addition, only two percent of small businesses across the United States have an owner aged 25 years old or less. Which makes Billy’s success even more startling. Since its inception in 2004, Billy has since grown Lexani Limousines with a first-year profit of $73,407 to a US$3 million business today, doubling its revenue growth every year for the past four years.  As president and CEO, Billy manages 37 employees, secures new business and handles the day-to-day operations for the company’s two offices in Phoenix and Tucson. “I think our biggest achievement is that we are still in business in this economy, and have doubled the fleet from last year and are already doubling our revenue (this year). We have also been ranked number 2 in Arizona by the Arizona Business Magazine,” Billy says. The biggest problem that plagued Lexani Limousines was, unsurprisingly, the price of oil. “Gas prices were a challenge. But just like everything else, we have learned and changed the way we do things to accommodate the higher prices.” And interestingly, none of his clients ever complained about his young age. “Most of our accounts don’t really know about my age until after they work with us. The ones that do know are surprised at first, but once they see our vehicles and the service we provide, it tends to be the last thing on their mind.” Lexani Limousines' Billy Jinks with two of his limos. Striving For Perfection Billy attributes his success to hiring quality drivers and support staff, keeping vehicles immaculate by washing and detailing them everyday and ensuring the best customer experience possible on every transport. Billy has even been known on the rare occasion to complete a pickup himself if a driver is unavailable at the last minute. “I think being personally being involved in daily operations and keeping the small company mindset. Attention to detail and perfection is key.” He shares that Lexani’s key selling point is closely related to its slogan, “Perfection Has Arrived”. “All of our cars are different from the competition. We offer a very unique fleet and customize our vehicles - none of them are stock from the dealer,” Billy declares proudly. Billy sees his job as both a career and hobby. “Honestly, I chose this path because it is what I like to do. It is truly what I enjoy. It just is a plus that it happens to be a major career and business. I have learnt many things, such as responsibility, financial things, importance of relationships, building credit, etc.” “You learn something everyday.” Yes, Entrepreneurs Can. Every entrepreneur makes a difference. Change the world, that is. Watch this inspiring video about entrepreneurs commissioned by virtual communications service provider Grasshopper, formerly known as GotVMail (I previously wrote about them here). The music is from noted composer Carly Comando, better known for her work used in the National Basketball Association (NBA)’s Where Amazing Happens. Mixergy.com Interviews - Learn from Web Entrepreneurs Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com. (Picture credit: Vimeo). If you’re an aspiring web entrepreneur, Mixergy.com has a great list of interviews you should listen to. Learn from the likes of more than 20 web entrepreneurs such as Premal Shah of Kiva.org, Squidoo’s Seth Godin, Alltop’s Guy Kawasaki and Mahalo’s CTO Mark Jeffrey. Founded by Andrew Warner, Mixergy.com organizes networking events and does online interviews to help Internet companies get better. Perhaps I should do something like that. TheFunded.com Launches New-Breed Incubator, Founder Institute TheFunded.com's Founder Institute early-stage incubator model can work in Singapore. I’ve often argued that one of the reasons why the startup community in Singapore is spluttering is because of the fact that we don’t have a good platform where successful and experienced entrepreneurs can help guide our newbie startups. There simply isn’t any incentive other than the feel-good factor for veterans to contribute back to the startup gene pool, after all. Or is there? Perhaps we can learn from TheFunded.com’s latest initiative. U.S-based online community of entrepreneurs and founders, TheFunded.com, has started The Founder Institute, a seed-stage incubator and mentoring program that will teach new and seasoned entrepreneurs on best practices for starting and building next-generation high-tech companies. Every semester, The Founder Institute will recruit 25 renown startup CEOs to mentor program participants and drive its curriculum. For example, its first four-month semester has a list of mentors that include Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, Trip Adler of Scribd, Scott Heiferman of Meetup, and Adify’s Russ Fradin. But the most interesting part of the The Founder Institute’s program is its unique economic model, where all the participants of the program is able to share in the equity upside of the entire semester. What does that mean? In short if one company in the program does well, all the companies - including the mentors - will stand to benefit. It’s a great way to spread overall risk. The program also has in-built provisions to protect participating founders, such as a “Class F” common stock and clauses that penalizes a company if its board of directors ever decides to kick out the founder some time down the road. I’ll stick my head out and argue that this model has the potential to be far more successful than any of the current incubator programs being run in Singapore right now, including MDA’s existing iJAM Microfunding scheme. Instead of he current dubious directive of tapping on “expertise” of recommended venture capitalists and other advisors, at least a The Founder Institute-like program gives startups access to real and seasoned entrepreneurs instead. Sure, Singapore’s entrepreneurial pool won’t be able to provide 25 successful mentors each semester, but that is not an insurmountable problem. The Founder Institute’s inaugural Summer 2009 semester will be held in Silicon Valley, and participating founders can access the sessions online as well. The application deadline is May 10th, 2009, so do sign up if you’re interested. Alternatively, if you’re an experienced startup CEO you can sign up to be a mentor here. Walden International puts S$2million into Brandtology Eddie Chau, founder and CEO of Brandtology. No guesses why he's smiling. Online intelligence service provider Brandtology today announced that it has received a capital injection of S$2 million from venture capital fim Walden International. Founder and CEO of Brandtology Eddie Chau says that the additional investment will help fuel the company’s expansion into new markets in North Asia. “Our next focus growth area is in North Asia as we see increased demand from clients requesting that we compliment their digital marketing strategy to listen to the social media scene of what is being said of their brands in the local language,” says Chau. “For example, China alone has about 298 million Internet users of which 91 million users actively participate in forums and 105 million users update their blogs regularly, as reported by China Internet Network Information Center. Companies can either tap on these resources to strengthen their brands with their digital marketing strategy or face the consequences of ignoring a tsunami of negative posts on their brands in this social media space,” he adds. Brandtology has recently expanded globally with offices in Australia, Malaysia and the People’s Republic of China - Shanghai and Hangzhou. Psydex - Making Data Psyng The Psydex executive team. The problem with online conversations these days is that there is too much of it. It’s exacerbated by the fact that social media has gone into overdrive and beyond the tipping point. Case in point - even Oprah’s on Twitter now. So how does one even begin to monitor online chatter and derive from it useful, coherent data? One Atlanta-based company, Psydex, believes it has the answer in its online news service portal Psyng. Psyng, pronounced “sing”, basically scours newswires, Internet feeds, TV closed captions, blogs and other sources of web “chatter” to deliver instant analysis and alerts on global news events as they happen. It helps brokers, journalists, brand managers, and others see real-time statistical patterns and trends in news media, social networks, human behavior and financial markets. Founded by CEO Rob Usey and CTO Don Simpson, Psydex consists of a core team of computer science and semantics experts aged from 38 to 44 who are spread across continental United States in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and North Carolina. “There is a media revolution underway and Psydex has the technology and services to change the way the world looks at news,” says Rob. “Because our system indexes and analyses both mainstream media and emerging social media sources we are effectively measuring and tracking ‘thought contagion’ in real time.” For example, when US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River in January, Psydex’s algorithms detected—within seconds of the incident—unusual chatter levels well before the news was broadly disseminated. Spotting the Gap, and Filling It Rob and Don has worked with each other for more than a decade. “We’re a well-balanced group. I’m more of the ideator. Don, meanwhile, is more of the left-brained type,” explains Rob. “We’ve both served as advisors to IBM, defense contractor SAIC and the federal government, focusing on the intersection of human language and computer science.” Rob, whose core experience lies in large-scale computing, semantics and data mining, says both he and Don have been obsessed with semantics and computational sciences for as long as he can remember. “In the late 90s, we saw how easily stocks and commodities could be measured and tracked over time and decided it should be just as easy to do the same for thoughts, ideas and news. In particular, we thought the concept of time and discourse analysis could be better applied to news and chatter… to better predict human behavior. After all, that’s what traders and investors really want to do, right?” When they first started the Psydex project, they identified two major weaknesses with traditional search services: the inability to search the real-time Web, and to search for content using a semantics-based approach. “Instead of using traditional ranking algorithms, we developed semantics-based algorithms coupled with statistical analysis to predict what people are being told and thus what they are thinking about. And instead of searching the ’slow’ Web, our developers went to work building code that searches the ‘fast’ ubiquitous communication mediums — such as instant messages, Twitter feeds and blogs.” “We believe our key USP is reducing the time for man and machine to understand and respond to critical news events. For professionals who make a living off of information, time — even seconds — equates to money. Since we search the real-time Web using more accurate methodologies, these professionals can have quicker, more relevant results at their disposal.” Psyng is the result of various patent-pending technologies developed after decades of R&D experience at leading computer companies and with large-scale government intelligence programs. “We’ve solved some of the really hard problems with analyzing semantics across both archived and real-time unstructured data streams.  Our novel approach is based on proprietary, grid-based semantic algorithms and a temporal search and discovery engine,” says CTO Don. “Psydex is the result of decades of experience working on some of the most challenging intelligence problems on the planet and learning where traditional approaches fail.” “We’re targeting professionals who thrive on real-time intelligence — people such as traders, investors, journalists and risk managers. As for who is currently using our services, several hedge funds are receiving our low-latency feeds,” Rob reveals. “No one, to our knowledge, does exactly what we do. But we do have major competitors at different levels. On the search side, we compete with Google and Yahoo!. On the information services side, we compete with Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Relegence and Dow Jones. We also partner with some of these companies, including Dow Jones. In addition, we partner with The Associated Press, AOL and several other firms.” When subscription-based Psyng was launched (on 21st April 2009), it registered several hundred users in the first day alone. The Search Isn’t Over Psydex was initially funded through its work with the intelligence community, but has recently raised funding to the tune of US$3.5 million. “Our newest investor, which led our Series A round of venture capital, is a large public company. Due to contractual obligations, we are not allowed to mention its name right now.” Rob admits that it had been extremely fortunate to have gotten funded in a down economy, and getting major hedge funds using its services. He says his goal is to establish Psydex as the brand for the fastest news analysis on the planet. “That may be bold, but I believe we can achieve this. As for our strategy, we are building partnership channels, making our APIs available to third parties, selling our news feeds, and getting integrated in sales trading desktops. We’re also building a growing army of ‘Psyngers’, or independent journalists, to our network.” There are plans to extend to more messaging services to allow Psyngers to receive alerts and notifications and submit observations. On Entrepreneurship Psydex is Rob and Don’s second major startup. Their first, KnowledgeX, an early provider of data mining and social networking services, was sold to IBM in 1998. “I do not believe entrepreneurship is something you can learn,” Rob says. “I naturally went down this path because I’ve always had an unconventional view of the world. I’ve also always been a little rebellious. Basically, I’ve struggled learning conventionally and wanted to figure things out on my own.” Relationship 101 for Startups: Guanxi Matters Relationship management is critical for startups (Image: Sourcejuice.com) A recent conversation over beer with two friends - one a local venture capitalist and the other works for a Singapore startup that is currently expanding its operations to other countries in the region - prompted an interesting debate over the importance of guanxi for startups. “Guanxi” (关系), which directly translates to English as “relationship” or “connection”, actually means a lot more than that. It is a concept that revolves around the dynamics and influence of personal networks and business relationships, and is an important and integral part of Chinese society. In fact, many business commentators will tell you, without guanxi you cannot do business in China. Likewise in Singapore, a country with a large Chinese population and strong business dealings with China, guanxi will be a critical factor in deciding the success or failure for many local startups. The simple truth is that most young founders starting their business for the first time will not have the luxury of an extended personal and business network, nor do they have the requisite experience to fully leverage upon those relationships. So it’s not just a case of what you know - it’s also who you know. Managing partner of California-based North Venture Partners, David Brody, equates guanxi to a form of social capital. “Social capital can be very useful when used the right way. Build yours by identifying people that share your vision, have expertise where you don’t, provide you inspiration and can ultimately lead you to achieve things.” Think of guanxi as an intangible asset that can bring great value to any startup. Nicholas Chan of local private incubator Azione Capital describes it this way. “Guanxi is like grease, it makes things smoother and a lot less noisier.” The Value of Guanxi  And having good guanxi has its rewards. “For funding, guan xi is 80 percent of everything,” Jeffrey Paine of private investment firm Battle Ventures explains. “If management is the major component for evaluation, then guanxi with the founders or the founders’ guanxi with their former employers and business partners matter a lot. One thing we do is we perform reference checks on management team we don’t know very well. Hence guanxi does matter a lot to a startup’s probability of raising capital.” Says Chris Mottau, David Brody’s colleague at North Venture Partners, “I personally would not be where I am without the relationships I have developed over the years.  My current work at North is the direct outcome of one such relationship, I was plucked from my position at an early-stage startup to come help North develop better and more meaningful relationships with entrepreneurs.” Bernard Leong of private business incubator Thymos Capital tells of an example of how what goes around comes around. “I funded one company and helped the founders for an iPhone app from the start. It came back a virtuous cycle when the founder recommended his friend another interesting deal to me. By accessing his work attitude, I also know the quality of people he recommends.” “Some start-ups grow fast via relationships through family and relatives in soliciting deals and getting partnerships to give the company a head start. Some relationships bring initial investors to the startups as well,” he adds. Building Guanxi So how do you build your guanxi? I’ve condensed some of the advice given by the VCs I spoke to into the following five points: 1. Be Humble. Because of their intense passion for their product or idea, startup founders sometimes let such unbridled feelings overrule their senses and hence can come across as cocky, aggressive, or worse, downright rude. All venture capitalists I spoke to stressed the importance of humility. Chris Mottau says, “Most entrepreneurs looking for funding are entirely too aggressive.  Obviously they all think their company is an outstanding opportunity, but trying to jam it down an investor’s throat by means of every technology platform available is off-putting.” “Almost all my deals are done via referrals or via my spotting of passionate individuals on the field,” says Nicholas Chan. “Rejects tend to be either too cocky or too intelligent for their own good, always expecting the investor to bow or beg them to be invested in.” “Do not be arrogant. If you are seeking investment, do not piss off any investor, because word gets around and comes around,” says Bernard Leong. “Even if you do not want the money from (a particular) investor, you should politely tell them that you will keep them in mind, otherwise, the next time you go to them, be prepared for a no.” 2. Build Trust. In fact, one of the investors I spoke to related a particular incident in which a startup who approached him for funding had taken his termsheet and went shopping for a better deal. “Never again,” he had said. As you can imagine, any trust between the potential investor and the startup is irrevocably broken.  “As startups, relationships are mainly based on trust,” says Jeffrey Paine of private investment firm Battle Ventures. “Startups have to have a culture of being humble, and focus on over-delivering. Talk less, do more.” “Do not try to test the patience of the other party, be truthful and be confident to sometimes say ‘I don’t know’”, Jeffrey adds. Azione’s Nicholas adds that trust is of utmost importance between startups and their customers and investors. “The wise customer (and investor) knows that a long term working relationship is based on the fundamentals that they are able to fully trust the startups they work with.” 3. Do your Due Diligence. “They should do due diligence on the people who they are cultivating relationships, i.e. try to find out more about the people they are trying to cultivate a relationship”, advises Bernard Leong. “They should also be sure of why they want to set up this particular relationship, from investment to partnership.” “Always maintain your standards, even if it ruffles the feathers of many,” adds Nicholas Chan. On the flip side, David Brody advises some entrepreneurs to sharpen their bullshit radar. “The investment capital space is unfortunately crawling with unsavory characters. Avoid taking a long and expensive ride on the scam tram. If someone says they “know how to find you capital” but and they haven’t shown you any credible evidence that they know how, ask them how they intend to do that. Your business is your baby and shouldn’t drain time working on developing a relationship with someone that isn’t offering up transparent communication. Use your instincts. And if you follow these principles, your social capital will hopefully take the form of large bills, not small coins.” 4. It’s About Give-and-Take. “Be honest, earnest and think of what they can offer of value to others first before asking for anything. Just as a typical boy-girl relationship involves sacrifice, it is about wanting to give of your best to ensure that the other party is totally and completely convinced of your goodwill and good intentions,” Nicholas says. “This is a two-way road; if the startup can see that the other party is only seeking to take and not to give, they must also know their worth.” Bernard Leong agrees. “In every relationship, there is a give-and-take situation. If you are only taking and giving nothing to people who help you, it is not a good way to set up a relationship,” he says. 5. Be Patient. North’s Brody shares that it is important to remember that real social currency is not created by getting a stranger to add you as a friend on Facebook or a connection on LinkedIn. “Strong relationships and trust are built over time, over multiple email exchanges, phone calls, and cups of coffee.” “Investors are busy people. Use good judgement and be respectful of someone else’s time. Tip: don’t treat investor’s like “one night stands” that offer up nothing more than a fat check. If you’re an entrepreneur, don’t “rush to raise”. What you probably need more than anything is valuable feedback and insights on your business and economic model. Use these learnings, become more “fundable”, and the money will come. Be patient. Don’t burn a potential fruitful relationship by coming off as a irrational stalker.” 6. Be Human. Ultimately, it’s all about being human. “If you don’t have any EQ, don’t waste your time. Just look at the number of failed ‘technopreneurs’ who only know how to program but does not know how to be human,” Nicholas Chan says. Additional Reading Resources Here are some recommended reading and resources with advice on “guanxi” for business and startups: 1. “Securing Venture Capital from China“, Businessweek 2. Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates’s Plan to Win the Road Ahead (book) 3. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (book) 4. “Breaking Through the Broken: The Transparent Guide to Overcoming the Inefficiencies in Early Stage Venture Capital“, by North Venture Partners Branserv - Applying Itself To Helping Software Startups Branserv - Looking for software companies to partner for its pilot program. Chicago-based startup hardware appliance maker Branserv has an incredibly lofty vision - to rebuild the American economy. “We’re trying to lead the way in creating a new generation of financially-sound technology companies. We want to help many companies get their feet back on the ground before they fly away,” says Alex Pyatetsky, Branserv’s VP of strategy and marketing. Branserv was founded by Ilya Stolyar, who previously founded systems integrator International Computer Concepts (ICC) in 1993. 49-year old president and CEO Ilyar may be no young upstart, but Alex is only 22-years old. VP of engineering, Alexey Stolyar, is 23. Alex and Alexey may be young but bring experience to the table. Alex had run his own successful event promotions company, High Contrast Events, while Alexey had worked as lead sales engineer and development director with ICC since 2002. When Branserv first started, the company was intended to leverage on ICC’s existing manufacturing facilities and vendor relationships to build OEM appliances. However, they realized that the appliance market was already pretty well saturated, and worse, all the competition targeted the exact same segment - networking security and data management. Reworking the Business Model So they went back to the drawing board. When they analyzed the market further, they found that all six major players presented the appliance business model in, in their opinion, an unattractive way. ” They all bombarded the prospect with too much information (and) made it appear incredibly difficult. So our first inspiration was to drastically simplify the appliance model.” But which market should they target? And then it hit them - many software startups, open source software shops and micro independent software vendors (ISVs) need a better way to make money. “Google was not longer acquiring. Ad revenue was no longer paying,” Alex points out. All other revenue options - including freemium models - had flaws of their own, as evidenced by this article in the Wall Street Journal by Chris Anderson of Wired. Branserv was thus reborn, to serve this market. “We were going to enable small companies with great software to leverage a whole new revenue model. We’re not going to charge them a startup fee or set any inventory minimums or make them do any extra work. All they would have to do is sell, and we’d handle everything else, from product design, manufacturing, to shipping, to return processing, etc.” In the meantime, the software company enjoys a revenue stream, support down and lower risk. Put that way, in the words of one software entrepreneur, “it’s pretty hard to ignore”. Branserv recently announced an Appliance Pilot Program where they’d give six software startups, ISVs or open source shops the opportunity to create appliances around their software at cost. “We’re going to break our backs to make sure they are successful so that the rest of the community can see how versatile and effective this revenue model is. The Pilot Partners will walk away with a real product that they can then sell at high margins for as long as they want. All in all, the opportunity is worth well over $5,000.” But it’s hardly surprising that Branserv is targeting this segment with such an offer of course. Like traditional venture capitalists, all they need is for one of the six startups they help to be a runaway hit, like a Twitter or Facebook, and their own success will also be sealed. Challenges and Opportunities The greatest challenge facing Branserv so far is the need to educate the community and target market about their offering. “We want people to understand why our offering has value so they can help us spread the word to potential partners. The somewhat technical and complex nature of what we’re doing has definitely been a challenge,” says Alex. “(But) we’ve been lucky to receive a decent bit of word-of-mouth on Twitter and elsewhere. I was surprised how quickly people started thinking of us as a legitimate startup and treating us with respect… we’re just trying our hardest to spread this word.” Branserv may be a bootstrapped startup, but thankfully unlike most others, it is fortunate to incubate with its parent - it shares ICC’s office, assembly and testing, and warehousing facilities (and a dog named Oscar) - and hence a lot of infrastructure costs don’t exist for them. On Entrepreneurship One of Branserv’s key company values, which they believe is critical to entrepreneurs, is to be remarkable. “From Day 1, we’ve intentionally chosen to pursue something that is remarkable - as in ‘worthy of remark’ and not neccessarily ‘amazing’. Anyone who have not read Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable” that has any vested interest in marketing a product of any kind should really read this book. You have to build marketing into the offering. Some offerings are just more worthy of recognition than others. We try to do this as much as possible.” Another important value it believes in is the familiar mantra ‘launch early, launch often’. “The principle of rapid iteration and continuous innovation (in software companies) is very important. Its not something that’s widespread in the hardware world, but we’re trying to adopt this mentality as best as we can. The key is to always strive to improve and listen to what the market is saying.” But the entrepreneurial life is not all work and no play - all three do have lives outside of work. Ilya is passionate about photography and gadgets, Alex is a professional DJ while Alexey is an Age of Empires maniac. “We’re all pretty interested in getting rich. Not necessarily quickly, but could never hurt,” laughs Alex. OrSiSo Helps You Organize Your Virtual Life OrSiSo - A desktop application that helps you organize and manage your social networks. Being a member of multiple social networks can be a pain, as Thorben Linneberg found out. Managing same friends on different networks, missing events he was invited to simply because he forgot to log into a particular network, coupled with the overwhelming flood of mails, pokes, requests and other notifications in his inbox, annoyed him. In frustration, the Singapore-based Dane started OrSiSo, a social network tool to help users manage and organize their online lives. The idea of a tool where all the flood of information on social networks would be centralized and prioritized grew in his head, and finally in October 2007 Thorben decided to put his ideas into a business plan. OrSiSo (Organize, Simplify, Socialize) was finally incorporated in December 2007. Aureliant, the company behind OrSiSo, currently has a team of six - along with Thorben, there is CTO Jerome Poudevigne, two full-time developers, a UI designer and a mobile platform specialist. Thorben, originally from Denmark, worked for different multinational corporations (MNCs) in Europe, US and Asia in the areas of mobile Internet and wireless technologies for a number of years. Jerome, a 44-year old Frenchman, is himself a serial entrepreneur with vast experience in building scalable systems. Social Networking’s Virtual Opportunity Social networking sites have seen explosive growth in terms of adoption and usage over the past few years - and this has offered an opportunity. Thorben believes that there is a market for a service that gives users the ability to aggregate and consolidate contacts, images, news feeds - regardless of whichever social networks they belong to. And that’s where OrSiSo comes in.  OrSiSo is built around various components, including an aggregation engine, and integrated instant messaging platform, and possibly the most important, a trademarked SocialCraft engine that automatically determines the usefulness of a particular piece of information to the user and which adapts accordingly to user behavior. Hence it only displays information that the user deems relevant or meaningful. “The key benefit of OrSiSo is that it takes the pain out of managing different networks and lets the user have fun again,” says Thorben. “With its intelligent filters, OrSiSo acts a lot lie the junk mail filter of your email software. With its one-click search function, it’s a lot like Google for your social life. Powerful functions like FriendMerge allow the reduce of clutter, while notifications, animated avatars, photo slide shows add to the entertainment factor.” OrSiSo currently supports eight networks - including Facebook, Friendster, Twitter and Flickr - and plan to add more every two weeks, such as MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut. For instant messaging, it supports Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, ICQ and Google Talk. It has plans to extend the system to include shopping sites such as Amazon and eBay, entertainment ones such as Last.fm, YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion, and eventually even dating networks. You can also organize your various instant messaging applications with OrSiSo. In the recent past, Open Social APIs didn’t exist and almost all networks worked in a “walled-garden” approach. “Today the industry has moved towards openness, and this has helped our progress greatly,” says Thorben. Making Money from Social Networks? OrSiSo's competitive landscape - How does it compare?  Certainly, OrSiSo is not only the social network aggregation tool in the online primordial soup - TweetDeck and Twhirl amongst others. But it seems that Aureliant believes it has a competitive advantage - it has its business model worked out. The aggregation and SocialCraft engines are the key to OrSiSo’s monetization. “Since we are able to gather a log of demographic information about users and their connections, we will be able to deliver highly-targeted advertisements,” shares Thorben. Advertisements can be delivered through various channels - traditional banner displays, advanced creative alerts using personalized avatars with custom messaging capability, product placements, and even the skinning of the entire application itself. Already, local telecommunications provider Starhub has a S$100,000 deal with Aureliant to offer SMS and VOIP services (comparable to Skype) through the former’s Pfingo platform. With an existing user base of around 200,000 subscribers, that is a considerable stream of potential income. Growth Potential The biggest challenge, Thorben admits, has been to get the product off the ground. Since its launch, it has attracted some 500 users just one week, and growth continues to be encouraging with a doubling of its user base every week. The challenge now is to continue to grow its user base as much as possible with a limited budget. OrSiSo targets users who typically are members of three social networks or more. They are also likely to multiple chat and email accounts, as well as accounts with online shopping sites such as Amazon or eBay. The current recession may have affected everyone, but the use of social networks is growing even faster right now. Thorben believes people see “refuge” on social networks from the recession. “In fact, we have seen a usage of OrSiSo that we didn’t think of when we created it.” For example, it’s being used by users to check out holiday destinations that their friends have been to. OrSiSo may currently be a desktop application, but Aureliant have plans to roll out a mobile version. “We have basic prototypes of the OrSiSo application for Symbian and iPhone which we expect to have ready during the second quarter of 2009.” “We are very focused on only adding features that bring real value to users.” On Entrepreneurship Aureliant raised US$200,000 at incorporation with a valuation of US$1million. It just completed its second seed round of around US$250,000, more than tripling its valuation to US$3.25million in 12 months. Thorben says the best thing about working on OrSiSo is the joy of working with a top motivated team that shares his enthusiasm. “Only by attracting the best talent can we succeed,” he says. If it hasn’t exactly tasted commercial success as yet, it’s already garnered industry accolades. OrSiSo recently won a Mobile Monday Singapore award for Best Startup, which was judged by a panel consisting of representatives from various mobile industry heavyweights such as Nokia, RIM, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Thorben is not going to let the award get to his head just yet. “I believe that you can only call yourself an entrepreneur after you have failed a few times. No business degree can prepare you for starting your own company. When I think back on important lessons I’ve learnt, I must say I always learnt much more from the difficult times,” says Thorben. “Never say never… never give up. Always listen but stay true to your own vision. Many people are extremely uncomfortable living with uncertainty - that is an area I am comfortable with today.” You can read another interview with Thorben with SG Entrepreneurs here. Metaversum Lands Red Herring Award Twinity, Metaversum's 3D virtual world, lands the company a Red Herring award Metaversum, maker of 3D online world Twinity, has been awarded a Red Herring 100 Europe award. Twinity is best known for recreating the virtual versions of the cities of Berlin and Singapore. “(The award) clearly confirms our vision of a 3D world based on real cities, allowing real people to interact and communicate with each other.” says Metaversum CEO Jochen Hummel. “Twinity is coming alive through our partners, including Cinestar, Berlin.de, Zitty, Be.Berlin, Bigpoint, Sony Pictures, the city of Singapore, Geek Terminal Singapore, The Digital Movement (TDM) and many others. Together with our users, they are filling our vision of a real 3D world with life.” The Red Herring 100 Europe award is given annually to the top 100 private technology enterprises headquartered in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa. You can find the other winners listed here. Inc Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary With Mind-Blowing Online Game Inc turns 30; Young|Upstarts has 27 more years to go. One of my favorite publications, Inc Magazine, turns 30 this year! To commemorate the occasion it has created a really fun interactive online game, The Great Garage Hunt, where you go rediscover 30 of the greatest companies that have been featured in the magazine over the past three decades. It’s a lot harder than it looks. I could only score 3 in 10 minutes before I gave up (hint: beer, consumer electronics, pizza). Yeah, I managed to get those closest to my heart. PS1: I have Inc’s podcasts on my iTunes, and if you’re a small business owner you should too. PS2: If you really enjoyed The Great Garage Hunt, you may also want to check out M&M’s Dark Chocolate, where you look for 50 horror movie titles hidden in a painting. Creepily addictive stuff. The Real Group Announces SmartLoans.sg; Makes Shopping For Home Loans Easy SmartLoans.sg - A new and easy way for finding and comparing home mortgage loan packages. Earlier this week, local startup The Real Group announced the launch of SmartLoans.sg, the first-of-its-kind online mortgage comparison service for the Singapore market. The free online service allows users to easily search for, compare and enquire about home loan packages available across eight different Singapore-based banks. “SmartLoans gives users more control over the mortgage and refinancing process. We aim to help our customers find the best deal when hunting for a mortgage,” says Vinod Nair, CEO of The Real Group. “Many potential home buyers will find SmartLoans very useful. At the same time, it will also help home buyers who are looking to refinance their existing mortgage compare their options.” “I am heartened to see The Real Group developing new innovative solutions for the real estate industry. Although the economic situation has had a dampening effect on the home buying scene, The Real Group have adapted their business model and developed new revenue-generating activities. More importantly, SmartLoans provides real value to its users,” said Prof Wong Poh Kam, Director of the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, which is incubating The Real Group. SmartLoans.sg is the third online service in The Real Group’s stable, after HomeSpace.sg and RentSpace.sg. Phokki.com Launches; Issues Call For Digital Artists Phokki.com - An online artists' marketplace to convert your photographs into customized digital artwork Phokki.com officially announced its launch today, opening possibly the world’s first online art gallery and marketplace for customized digital artwork. An online space to matchmake digital artists and their customers, Phokki.com aims to give “a face and a space” online to digital artists without a gallery or retail front to attract and sell to customers. Many of these artists could be, as Phokki.com puts it, “hidden from the public eye in middle-man studios” and thus suffer from the lack of recognition and opportunity. “The Phokki artist market will be a place where the consumers will be spoilt for choice in the range and diversity of digital styles available,” says Sean Seah, CEO of Singapore-based Phokki.com. “Whether it’s a case of time-tunneling you from a 2009 photo of yourself to a 1960s retro vector-styled version or a case of pumping power into your 10-year old kid by turning an innocuous photo of him into one where he is a red-caped, sword- yielding 300 Spartan defending the Thermopylae or transformed into a robotic transformer defending the world!” Phokki.com also incorporates social networking functions and an active art community. Digital artists can join to offer their services by simply signing up for an account and uploading their sample portfolios onto the site. Sign up before 15 April to participate in a digital art competition and you have a chance to win a Wacom Bamboo. The Rise Of The Sellsumer Sellsumers - Consumers will increasingly sell, made possible by online democratization of demand and supply, and fueled by a global recession that leaves consumers strapped for cash. (Image courtesy of Trendwatching.com) In Trendwatching.com’s latest briefing report, the independent trend observation firm believes it has spotted a new trend. It claims that during these recessionary times, many ordinary consumers will increasingly become a new class of consumers called the sellsumers. Due to “a recession-induced need for cash” and “an ever-growing infrastructure that allows individuals to act as (part-time) entrepreneurs”, many consumers will look for multiple ways to make money, instead of just spending it. It’s a valid observation. We’ve also been seeing signs of sellsumers in Singapore. It’s recently been reported in the local papers that blog shops on the rise, and in some cases of young mothers using such blog shops to supplement household incomes by selling anything from cosmetic contact lenses to baby products. For those of you who are into small business retail, I’ve previously given advice on pushcart entrepreneurship, where to locate a pushcart, and also a list of places in Singapore which rents out spaces for pushcarts. Alternatively, you can consider this alternative to pushcarts. In desperate times, creativity flourishes. Are you a sellsumer? If you are, do you have any good stories or experiences to share with us? BrandIQ? Jamtology? Not. JamIQ, Brandtology: No Merger. Rumor has it that the founders of competing online social media monitoring services Brandtology and JamIQ recently met up for potential acquisition talks. The deal apparently fell through as both sides couldn’t reach an agreement. Radio Celeb Hints Of Upcoming Podcast Series Local veteran radio celebrity and DJ Joe Augustin, whose contract with Power98FM was acrimoniously cancelled last month, has hinted at the recent BlogOUT! ‘09 blogger conference of plans for a daily audio podcast series in the near future. Singapore To Get New Posterboy For Entrepreneurial Success? Jon Yongfook The room was totally packed at the keynote presentation in BlogOUT! ‘09, but you can’t truly be sure what the crowd was here for. Jon Yongfook Cockle, a Tokyo-based blogger and web producer who recently sold his recipe social network Open Source Food to Tsavo Media, was speaking about how to turn a blog into a business. A subject topic that’d appeal to most bloggers during such shattered economic times, but that’s probably not what enraptured the crowd. It was because he was just that dastardly good-looking, and so very eloquent. Judging from the gasps and sighs emanating from the crowd, it’s unlikely that the girls heard a single word of what he said. Twitter was all a-flutter about how cute he was. He has male fans too, of course. Howie Chang, president of The Digital Movement that organized BlogOUT! ‘09, calls Yongfook his idol when it comes to “design and user-interfaces”. Yes so that makes him both talented and good-looking, and therefore easy to hate. In his presentation, Youngfook shares why he thinks advertising as a revenue model is very limiting for blogs and highlights some of the other ways blogs can be monetized. What you may not know is that Yongfook graduated with a finance degree, just because his mom made him get one (she’s Singaporean after all). So he should know a little about making money. These days Yongfook amuses himself as the CEO of Egg Co, a business incubator that looks at working closely with digital startups. He is also about to launch Rippl3, a social media campaign measurement service. The good news for the ladies, is that the half-Singaporean is looking to relocate to Singapore in the near future. When that happens, we’ll get our new posterboy for entrepreneurial success. Asia Wants Schwag! Sounds like there’s an Asian version of StartupSchwag.com coming up, due to launch in April. Asia Wants Schwag! Sounds like there’s an Asian version of StartupSchwag.com coming up, due to launch in April. Hello world! Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! It’s A Prettysmart* Appeal For Collaboration It was a hot and sultry Monday evening at the Raw Kitchen Bar, located on the premises of the old fire station along Upper Bukit Timah Road. More than forty people were crammed into the confines of the refurbished building, but no one seemed to mind. At least ten of them were peering at tiny pieces of blue paper stuck on the white-washed walls. Upon finer inspection, those Post-It notes contained tips of sorts - ranging from advice on writing techniques to quirky anecdotes. Those present were told that they could take away any of those Post-It notes they liked, but only if they replaced each with one containing a tip of their own. This Is Pretty Smart This creative exercise was the brainchild of Natasha Golding, the host for the evening, and the people gathered here were her friends, business partners and acquaintances to help celebrate the launch of her new consultancy, prettysmart*. Natasha, a seasoned freelance writer, previously provided copywriting services and communications consultancy under her first business, The Right Words. As she worked with her clients during this period, Natasha realized some of the problems they faced with communications - not knowing what their business was about, the words to describe themselves, not having the time or information to plan and create websites to truly reflect their business - and believed she could help them. And so prettysmart* was conceived. She explains to her audience that, in her new business, “we don’t believe in telling people what to do”. “We give advice, we share our knowledge, but we also help people explore their own ideas and discover their own solutions”, she says. “It’s about using more of a coaching approach. We provide the steady, practical and kind support that helps people find the solutions that work for them.” But don’t take her word for it - check what her clients have said instead. During her presentation, Natasha surprised her audience by raving about rising Singapore startup Gothere.sg. She recounted how she first learnt of them at Unconference 2008, where she “was blown away by the energy, the creativity and the comfortable informality” of the event. “It’s smart,” she says of the location-based service. “It gives very useful, precise and detailed information. Little things like the prices of the bus or cab ride make a difference. The developers have thought about me, and what I need.” “It’s pretty. It’s not from the old school of technology, built by geeks with no style. It’s simple, comfortable and shows some personality in the conversational copy.” Gothere.sg’s site design, she said, is everything she wants her consultancy to be for her clients - simple, clean, communicative and, most importantly, gives them exactly the results they need. A Call For Partners and Collaborators She also tells her audience that prettysmart* is looking at partnering to offer more to businesses. “We need writers who passionately desire to increase the amount of well-planned, meaningful and accessible web text on the Internet. prettysmart* helps businesses do the planning and thinking that forms the basis of great communication. But we also actually write and edit copy.” Many of the people she invited to the Raw Kitchen Bar were freelancers, and to these people she made her call for collaboration. “We plan to work with more designers and developers. We need people who share our philosophy about websites being a piece of communication. People who believe that authenticity is a key principle in business and communication.” “If you are one of the people we need to talk to email me, natasha [at] thisisprettysmart [dot] com.” She ends her presentation by thanking the people who have helped her put her launch party together. Judging by the number and quality of people she thanked, especially the effusive praise she heaped on her web designer Dennis Lim of Mavericks Interactive, it seems that prettysmart* already has a slew of good people the consultancy can work with. Related Posts:Singapore Startups at the e27 Unconference Singapore 2008ShowNearby.com - It's All About Location, Location, LocationWidgeo.us - Communications 'R UsHow An Alumni Helped Unigo.com Get Off The GroundJorbb.com - Employment Goes Casual Barcamp Singapore 3 Barcamp Singapore 3 is happening this weekend, and promises to see many interesting and quirky folks from the IT, media, energy, bio-tech and other industries get together to share ideas with one another. You have talks ranging from the super geeky, such as “Web 2.0 + Live Robots + Machines + Sharing”, to the truly bizarre “Why do I street-sing? And why YOU should too!”. Here’s a list of the confirmed topics. Unfortunately I have relatives who are visiting from Melbourne, Australia, so I’ll only be attending for a couple of hours from 1.30 to 3.30pm. If you’re going, feel free to look for me during those hours. You can register for the event here. Related Posts:Widgeo.us - Communications 'R UsEvent: Pulse of SuccessWe'd Love To Hear From You...Event: Bringing Your Business to the Next LevelInteresthink 3: Causes & Ideas It’s A Prettysmart* Appeal For Collaboration It was a hot and sultry Monday evening at the Raw Kitchen Bar, located on the premises of the old fire station along Upper Bukit Timah Road. More than forty people were crammed into the confines of the refurbished building, but no one seemed to mind. At least ten of them were peering at tiny pieces of blue paper stuck on the white-washed walls. Upon finer inspection, those Post-It notes contained tips of sorts - ranging from advice on writing techniques to quirky anecdotes. Those present were told that they could take away any of those Post-It notes they liked, but only if they replaced each with one containing a tip of their own. This Is Pretty Smart This creative exercise was the brainchild of Natasha Golding, the host for the evening, and the people gathered here were her friends, business partners and acquaintances to help celebrate the launch of her new consultancy, prettysmart*. Natasha, a seasoned freelance writer, previously provided copywriting services and communications consultancy under her first business, The Right Words. As she worked with her clients during this period, Natasha realized some of the problems they faced with communications - not knowing what their business was about, the words to describe themselves, not having the time or information to plan and create websites to truly reflect their business - and believed she could help them. And so prettysmart* was conceived. She explains to her audience that, in her new business, “we don’t believe in telling people what to do”. “We give advice, we share our knowledge, but we also help people explore their own ideas and discover their own solutions”, she says. “It’s about using more of a coaching approach. We provide the steady, practical and kind support that helps people find the solutions that work for them.” But don’t take her word for it - check what her clients have said instead. During her presentation, Natasha surprised her audience by raving about rising Singapore startup Gothere.sg. She recounted how she first learnt of them at Unconference 2008, where she “was blown away by the energy, the creativity and the comfortable informality” of the event. “It’s smart,” she says of the location-based service. “It gives very useful, precise and detailed information. Little things like the prices of the bus or cab ride make a difference. The developers have thought about me, and what I need.” “It’s pretty. It’s not from the old school of technology, built by geeks with no style. It’s simple, comfortable and shows some personality in the conversational copy.” Gothere.sg’s site design, she said, is everything she wants her consultancy to be for her clients - simple, clean, communicative and, most importantly, gives them exactly the results they need. A Call For Partners and Collaborators She also tells her audience that prettysmart* is looking at partnering to offer more to businesses. “We need writers who passionately desire to increase the amount of well-planned, meaningful and accessible web text on the Internet. prettysmart* helps businesses do the planning and thinking that forms the basis of great communication. But we also actually write and edit copy.” Many of the people she invited to the Raw Kitchen Bar were freelancers, and to these people she made her call for collaboration. “We plan to work with more designers and developers. We need people who share our philosophy about websites being a piece of communication. People who believe that authenticity is a key principle in business and communication.” “If you are one of the people we need to talk to email me, natasha [at] thisisprettysmart [dot] com.” She ends her presentation by thanking the people who have helped her put her launch party together. Judging by the number and quality of people she thanked, especially the effusive praise she heaped on her web designer Dennis Lim of Mavericks Interactive, it seems that prettysmart* already has a slew of good people the consultancy can work with.