Seedcamp comes to Asia

Seedcamp, the seed fund and startup pitching event from Europe, is doing their first event in Asia in Singapore on 5 Oct.

The event will see 20 Singapore startups do five-minute pitches, with panels and one-on-ones with mentors thrown in. The event is billed Mini Seedcamp Singapore.

“We chose Singapore because we have some existing network and connections there. Also, it is a regional hub for entrepreneurial activity – one that also looks beyond its borders and is an influence to the whole region,” said Philipp Moehring, an associate at Seedcamp. 

Moehring said the mentors and participating startups for Mini Seedcamp Singapore haven’t been decided yet.

“The applications (from startups) that are already in paint a promising picture,” Moehring said.

Startups that take part in Mini Seedcamp events may receive investment from Seedcamp or be invited to go to the annual Seedcamp Week in London. Five out of the 20 startups at Seedcamp Week get an investment of up to 50,000 Euros (US$63,500) in exchange for 8-10% of the company.

Startups who have taken part in Seedcamp events have gone on to receive funding from noted VCs like Union Square Ventures and Eden Ventures.

Foound one of 7 startups with new funding

Neoteny Labs has made an investment in Foound, the hottest startup at Echelon 2010. This puts an end to the weeks of rumors swirling around Singapore’s startup scene about the deal.

Foound makes a free* iPhone app of the same name that makes it easier for users to set times and places to hang out. The invested amount was undisclosed.

The Foound investment was one of seven deals closed by incubators operating under the Singapore government’s Technology Incubation Scheme. The National Research Foundation (NRF), which runs the scheme, announced the news in a press release today.

Under the scheme, the NRF pays for 85% of an investment while the incubator takes care of the rest. Investments are capped at US$367,000. The scheme has a total of US$37 million to invest.

“Unfortunately, we can’t disclose more about the funding other than what has been disclosed by NRF. This is due to some technicalities about the disclosure,” Danny Tan, Foound’s co-founder, told us by email. “But I can tell you for Foound, NRF is only one of the investors and there are actually a lot more interesting stories behind the other investors.”

Neoteny Labs, which is run by noted angel investor Joi Ito, also invested in Socialutions, which is developing a licensing and distribution web platform for content creators based on the Creative Commons framework called CreationMix.

Another incubator with two investments was Clearbridge Accelerator which invested in Clearbridge BioMedics and Clearbridge NanoMedics. The two firms develop biomedical devices related to oncology and nanotechnology. They were spun off from projects at the National University of Singapore.

The incubator Social Slingshot made three investments. Artyii is an invite-only platform to buy and sell Asian art. ShoppingLifestyle is a web portal for women that ComScore ranks the top women’s portal in Singapore and Malaysia. Socialico develops social fantasy prediction games under the brand FameLeague. Social Slingshot is founded by Brad Greenspan, who controversially calls himself Myspace’s founder.

*An earlier version of this article wrongly said that Foound sells its iPhone application. It is in fact free.

Hong Kong Government Funding for Startups

We’ve added Hong Kong to our Government funding for Startups in Southeast Asia chart following our recent visit to StartUP Saturday in Hong Kong. Funding and financial support offered by Hong Kong extend to SMEs and ideas from the interactive digital media and the creative industries.

If you know of any more, drop us a note and we’ll add it.

BlackBerry Developer Day 2010 wraps up

Two BlackBerry Developer Days were held last week in Singapore and Jakarta in Indonesia. Both events attracted hundreds of reservations from interested developers.

The Singapore event was held on 17 Aug at the Pan Pacific Hotel in the heart of the city’s vibrant new Marina Bay area. It’s where the annual Formula One street race is held, and is a stone’s throw from the new Marina Bay Sands resort and casino.

Research in Motion’s Johan Kremer, the senior manager for alliances in Southeast Asia, kicked the daylong event off with a talk on monetizing on BlackBerry’s platform. Paddy Tan of Singapore mobile security solutions firm Bak2U gave a talk about developing applications for BlackBerry. Other topics covered at the Developer Day were BlackBerry App World 2.0’s release later this month, BlackBerry 6, and BlackBerry’s web and widget platform.

“The best part of the event for me was information on the new APIs, the new advertising platform and payment system in App World 2.0,” said Andre Siregar, an independent app developer.

Indonesia’s edition of BlackBerry Developer Day had a reservation list of more than 400 participants. The event was held at the Ritz-Carlton Pacific Place. Many of the same topics were covered for this larger audience. Indonesia has more than a million BlackBerry users, making it one of the largest BlackBerry markets in Southeast Asia.

Daniel Tumiwa of Indonesian BlackBerry app developer 7Langit gave a talk about making apps for the BlackBerry platform. 7Langit produces a range of apps for the BlackBerry including DompetDhuafa, which streamlines the Islamic practice of giving donations, GempaLoka, an earthquake alert app and even an app for Indonesian Idol, the local version of the popular American talent show.

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Nuffnang boss Ming Shen’s bold plan for e-commerce

Ming Shen is one of those serial entrepreneurs. He set up a holding company, Netccentric Pte. Ltd., with his partner, Timothy Tiah, while fresh out of the London School of Economics with the intention to launch multiple business ideas.

They started with blog advertising network Nuffnang in Penang with just two developers, one web developer and one web designer.  Nuffnang 1.0, which Ming admitted was a really bad site, did the job. It was launched in Malaysia in Feb 2007 and then in Singapore in April  the same year. Nuffnang now has five offices, based in Penang and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Singapore, Manila in the  Philippines and Melbourne in Australia respectively.

Netccentric now runs Nuffnang, social media ad network Churp Churp, web design firm RippleWerkz and their latest service, e-commerce solution provider Jipaban.

Ming recently expanded his job scope from focusing only on Nuffnang to a broader corporate development role at Netccentric. He now oversees the group’s four units while developing further projects for Netccentric. He has also been nominated for the Spirit of Enterprise Award 2010.

e27 caught up with Ming at his Netccentric office, nestled in a quiet spot amid the hustle and bustle of Little India, to find out more about what’s new at Nuffnang, his plans to turn Jipaban into an Amazon-like e-commerce firm, and his new role at Netccentric.

Jipaban is competing to be one of Asia’s Top 50 Apps. Like it? Vote for Jipaban here.

What’s new at Nuffnang

“We have about 160,000 bloggers. 3.2 million unique visitors per day. 97% of the blogs are exclusive to Nuffnang. So we are the market leader. “

The effect of the rise in social network advertising on Nuffnang

“Not really, because it is still a very small base. Although Nuffnang’s revenue is in the millions and the profits are in the millions also. It is still a very small market overall. This is like the whole of Asia-Pacific. Malaysia has an online ad-spend of US$15 million, Singapore US$22 million, Philipines about US$30 million and Australia alone is US$2.3 billion for just digital online. So it really doesn’t cause a dent, in fact there are too few options. Your offerings to advertise online are not too many.”

Nuffnang’s next move

“Nuffnang is going to continue doing what it does. At the same time, we always innovate, so we launch new products, services and campaigns. Beyond that, we launch new businesses like Churp Churp which basically does social media seeding. We use our database of influencers who are active on Facebook, Twitter and online forums to go in there and spread or seed messages and influence people. So Churp Churp takes care of the social media and social networking side. Nuffnang handles blogs and Churp Churp handles social media, so they complement each other. This allows us to do things on Facebook, for example, we can get our influencers to invite people to join a particular Facebook group.”

Why Nuffnang over Jipaban

“Nuffnang was a lot easier to do. Firstly, in terms of execution, programming-wise it was easier to do. Secondly, cost was significantly lower. The demands of Jipaban is a lot higher. When you go to e-commerce, it is not just about setting up an e-commerce platform. Proper e-commerce businesses, like Amazon, are not actually just e-commerce businesses. They are e-commerce with logistics behind it. There’s warehousing or delivery going behind the scenes. That is where Jipaban will ultimately go to. Finding a turnkey solution for people who want to sell online but don’t have the means to do so. So it is not just an online platform, you need a huge logistics network.

We totally pushed Jipaban aside. When you do a business you have to focus on it. So like what we did, we focused on growing the blog advertising business as good as we can. And we did it. It was definitely the right decision to do Nuffnang first because it now gives us a lot of stability, it gives us cash, it gives us resources, and also a network that we can actually tap on to grow Jipaban.

Today, Jipaban has 16,000 registered users, which is over a period of three-months. Honestly speaking, it is not easy to get 16,000 registered users. People going through a normal shopping mall and just browse……when you get them to register, it is something different. And this is all down to Nuffnang.”

Demographics of Jipaban

“Definitely more female-skewed at this point of time. Half the reason for that is because of the retail mix. The retail mix is very female oriented. That is not something that is going to remain the case. We are going to introduce a greater retail mix to attract more male buyers. The reason why the retail mix is currently as such is because blogshops are the lowest hanging fruits. They have a basis into e-commerce, they don’t have a good platform and Nuffnang knows all of them. Therefore, it is easy to put them in now. But when you see offline shops coming in, those from different backgrounds, that is when you are going to see diversity coming in and that’s where we are going to push for more advertising. Right now all the advertisings are done on Nuffnang, Facebook and other online venues. But once we achieve a better retail mix, we will go above the line to do advertising such as on buses, cabs and other offline media. That will kind of push us much further. “

Initial reaction to Jipaban

“The retailers’ reaction was definitely very encouraging in a way because they like the fact that it is easy for them to use and they have instant access to a market. The buyers’ reaction, I think it took some time to train up. We do have significant revenues, but is it at the optimum level? The answer is no. It takes time for people to get used to a particular concept.

And this is quite a radical concept. For example, for all the other online shops, you can just go in at free will to browse. On Jipaban, you have to go in, create an account, create your mall and add your things. It will take some time for it to sink in. But once it does, I think it will be very powerful. The whole reason why we went down this route was because it was the harder road, but we get demographics and we can target for example for in-mall promotions, once we know what your age is, who you are, what your buying patterns are we can do things. It is all in the database which you can easily organize, giving the retailers more power in terms of information. We can help them market to a specific group of people.”

Jipaban as a consultant

“Definitely. The whole point is we want to enable our retailers in any way that we can with the information that we have. Of course, we have to decide how the information is handled. Do we price the information? How do we price it? It is like the whole Google story whereby they price by using an auction system. When you have varying demands and limited resources, you need to decide how to price your resources and that is exactly what we would do.  ”

Jipaban’s competitors

“I don’t think there are any competitors for Jipaban at this time. Sites like eBay are product-listings based, they are not shop-based. Even though eBay has eBay Shops, it is not the same concept whereby it is really shopfronts and malls. Our concept is really malls, shops and social networking. It is still a unique concept. I think a lot of companies are starting to try to merge social networking with shopping, but we are a very new concept so there are no competitors. “

What about Zozotown, which serves the Japanese market with a virtual mall portal — a similar concept to Jipaban?

“The basic concept is the same. and that is it has a somewhat central focus on shops instead of products. If you browse around though, this is not as central as ours. However, on the features level it is entirely different, for example, we focus on a customizable mall for each user. And we integrate it with social networking features. Both ways, features can be tweaked, and the ultimate USP (unique selling point) will always be retailers and variety.”

Expansion plans

“After Malaysia, it is endless. We could go to Australia, the Philippines, following the expansion path of Nuffnang because we have partners and networks there that we can use. Or it could go to a different country altogether like Japan and the US. It just depends on how we develop. The business model is much more of a fluid business plan than Nuffnang’s because consumer behavior is something that you cannot accurately predict. So you need to react to consumer behavior and change as you go along.”

Strength of Jipaban’s brand in an international market

“I think it will perform well. Singaporeans may look at Jipaban and think that it is a Hokkien thing but the reason why we also chose that was because we knew that when we go overseas we’ll actually market it more as a Japanese thing. Japan has kind of like a cult following. So what we are going to do is something like Ji-Pa-Ban. Right now it is like one word but when used overseas it may be split up into three words that people can remember, Ji-Pa-Ban, something like Clap-Clap.  We’ll just get it into people’s head. At the end of the day, it is always going to have an Asian context, an Asian flavor to it, an Asian identity. That is not going to change, but how we identify it to people later is by doing this Japanese kind of style.”

RippleWerkz

“RippleWerkz is just a small web design company. What we felt as we were going out doing our rounds, meeting advertisers and stuff like that, we realize that a lot of them don’t have well designed sites even though they are very advanced companies. They have very old, flat, one-dimensional looking sites. So we thought, why not just help them? At the same time, it kind of work in with our purpose of helping to up the quality of blogs. Ultimately it is just synergistic of our business in totality. Nuffnang and Jipaban’s designs were all done by RippleWerkz.”

Role change

“How it changes me is that my time is much shorter now. It is so intense because I guide the overall direction of the company. I have three companies on this level, and I go into each company to see what they are doing. There’s always a new direction to take and a new strategy to take. I am kind of mentoring them so it is very intense. Dealing with one business, it can get very mundane. But when you are like going from one business to another, changing your mindset every time you walk into a different room. It is so fresh that the experience just passes you by.

New developments from Netccentric

“I love doing business and I like doing it right. I don’t do a business just for the sake of doing a business. There are new projects that are coming up, one will be launching in November so you should keep a lookout for that. There will also be some minor acquisitions within the companies so we might be taking over smaller companies here and there or we might be going through some joint ventures. Nuffnang will be expanding to at least one major territory this year. “

PropertyGuru spin-off, Amazon’s startup contest comes to Asia, Chumby demo at HackerspaceSG

PropertyGuru spins off commercial property site: Singapore property listings portal PropertyGuru announced that it has launched a commercial and industrial property listings site called CommercialGuru. Allproperty Media Pte Ltd, which owns both sites, claims over 7,000 listings on the new site and 40,000 business users on PropertyGuru. Singapore Entrepreneurs analyzes information about the new site and concludes that its burn rate is US$24,000 a month.

Amazon Web Services opens global Start-Up Challenge to Asian entries: Amazon Web Services announced that its annual Start-Up Challenge will allow Asia-based contestants to join for the first time. Individuals and companies based in Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea. Contestants are judged on how they use Amazon’s cloud platform. The global winner gets US$50,000 cash and US$50,000 in Amazon Web Services credits. Unconference alumni iTwin was highlighted in the Amazon press release as an example of a startup that already uses their cloud platform. Entries must be received by 31 Oct.

JLJ Holdings chairman resigns because of Apple suit: The chairman of JLJ Holdings, a Singapore-based manufacturer, has resigned voluntarily. The firm is one of six Asian companies named by Apple in a lawsuit. Apple alleged that a former employee was taking kickbacks from Asian suppliers in exchange for leaked information that would help them win contracts from Apple. The Business Times reports that JLJ has worked with Apple for nearly a decade.

India tests access to encrypted BlackBerry data: India’s Intelligence Bureau is testing a method of monitoring encrypted corporate email sent by BlackBerry handsets. If the method works, the Indian government may not ban BlackBerry corporate email and instant messaging.

MyFatPocket.com to launch Singapore location-based beauty price guide: MyFatPocket.com is launching Hot Prices, which it says is Singapore’s first location-based price guide. It will feature up to 100 cosmetics, skincare and fragrance brands. The content portal, which targets women in Singapore, was revamped on 17 Aug a year after launching.

Event – Singapore – 27/8/10 – Chumby Industries at Hackerspace: Chumby Industries, maker of cool Linux devices designed for working off the cloud, has just opened a Singapore office. Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang is general manager at the new office and he will give a presentation about the chumby ecosystem and dismantle a ‘chumby One’ device as well. They’re also looking to staff up with ‘enthusiastic hackers’.

Ace designer Hong Qu on localization and Asia

Hong Qu is an early YouTuber who led its Asia localization strategy. The New Yorker is a user interface and user experience ace who studied at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. He left Youtube in 2009 and is now back in New York consulting at a few startups there and hatching a plan to save journalism.

We caught up with Hong ahead of his talk at Accelerate 2010. He tells us why he makes it difficult to Google him, why China’s websites look the way they do, and the websites he considers the best designed right now.

Hear Hong Qu live at Accelerate 2010, Asia’s largest innovation conference on Sept 22-23. Book by 31 Aug for more than 30% off tickets. Use promo code ‘E27EARLY’.

Google’s localization strategy
When I work in Silicon Valley, all the companies there dread the point where they have to internationalize and globalize the products because they know it’ll be really painful from an engineering point of view to write code for that.

But at Google, that was one of the top three priorities for any product to capture market share in any market. Because they learned that if Google search wasn’t localized early on, all the local players would capture the market and it’s really hard to win the market back. So the question is, that if you don’t think about it and lose the market share early, then you need even more resources and it’s much harder to get the market share you lost. Like YouTube, they launched in 20 or 30 countries in the first six months, using the local languages.

On BBS popularity in Asia
One point I always make about Asia is that, for whatever reason, BBSes are so popular compared to the West. Some people have attributed it to the lack of content created on webpages. Creating a webpage actually is not an easy process, but in Western countries, there are so many tools in English and people are used to creating websites. The data can live on the website.

But maybe before the last five years (in Asia), BBSes were a good way to exchange information because all you had to do was log in and post. It is another way to maintain anonymity but still exchange information, so again there is that sense of preserving privacy.

So BBSes generates the content, but in a Q&A fashion, so that’s why you see the question-and-answer model woks so well in smaller markets. Definitely in China but more so in Korea, the question-and-answer type of search-engine yields good results and works well for the company in terms of search market share.

It might be changing with blogs and things like Facebook and other easy tools to create content, but i think it’s just a legacy of how BBSes enable a very simple way of creating content — asking questions.

One of YouTube’s top localization tips
An outcome of my research in the local markets was something very subtle but actually drove adoption by double-digits. When you look at the ’share’ options on YouTube in Singapore versus YouTube in Japan, the social networks are customized to be the leading social networks in that country. So instead of say Myspace, in Korea we would show Cyworld. Even that simple change of just having a database of local market’s social networks be the default sharing option  will drive your adoption and usage. It helps you spread the content virally in local markets.

On internet privacy
Why’s your website just a weird Twitter mash-up?
It’s just for fun, it’s mash-up I made. I purposely keep all my online presence somewhat low key because i know there lots of privacy issues out there.

[When] I was still at  Berkeley in 2006, 2007, I came to the realization that privacy’s gonna be a bigger and bigger issue and companies and products like Facebook would need to struggle with this.

In my work at YouTube, I came upon two patterns of preserving privacy strategies that the users at YouTube would employ. One is not to show their physical appearance, so they won’t show their face. So it’s anonymity just by not revealing their real identity. The other one is anonymity just by not labeling [a video] correctly. So your face is in it, but you don’t tag it, you don’t give it out, you don’t associate it with your real names.

Weighing in on the Facebook privacy issue
So, there’s a whole, like, philosophy of privacy — put it this way, there has to be contextual integrity. That’s a very fancy way of saying, information belongs to me, I control all my information, but depending on the context, the other side could, or should, have access depending on the context.

So in this context I give you information willingly. We’re doing an interview and it’s helpful for you to get a sense of what all that is. But not in a public context where anyone can get to it.

Even in a job interview the potential employer would need to see your resume, your history — there’s no question about that. In that context it’s valid for them to ask you about certain questions. But sometimes they can’t even ask you about whether you have children or what religion you are — that’s not the right context. It really depends on the circumstance and the control that the person has over their own information.

So for any company that owns that piece of information, like Facebook, they need to very clearly disclose what they know about you so you that you can go in, verify it, and correct anything that’s not accurate. So if a credit report says I have a very low credit score, and I dispute it, there should be a process for me to change that. I don’t think Google (for example) allows for that right now.

So Google wouldn’t pass your test of contextual integrity?
Exactly. That’s why I don’t use it, I don’t try to index myself.

On China website design, which tends to be extremely busy
I basically had some conversations with the local Google designers in China and I think the Chinese — maybe even all the Asian languages like Japanese, Korean — information density is the key word here. And I think because the characters, just from my point of view, you can fit a lot into a small space. It’s more rectangular, I guess.

It’s actually a very interesting sociology, anthropology study. It’s an outcome of the signage and population density. Because if you go to a city center in Asia as opposed to a city center (in the US), maybe except New York, it’s very different. The signage laws prevent you from being too wild, too flashy (in the US).

There’s just not enough people for you to go to a downtown (in the US) and get that sense of density. If you choose a restaurant in Asia, you pick it by how many people are in it. So in a way, you pick a website by how much content or how much activity is in it, just by glancing at the homepage and seeing what’s going on, how lively it is.

Best designed websites?
Netflix and Quora.

Photo credit: UC Berkeley

Free beer with tenCube!

Singapore’s startup scene is abuzz about tenCube’s sale to McAfee. Celebrate with the tenCubers at the Accelerate 2010-tenCube party tomorrow.

We’ve arranged for a certain amount of free beer (yes, free beer) so that we can spend the evening eating, drinking and talking startups. The party is almost full now, so you know what to do if you want to come.

You can get a very special price on tickets to Accelerate 2010 at the party too. It’s an even sweeter deal now because all ticket-holders get SGD500 of credit with cloud infrastructure operator Alatum.

There will also be a panel and Q&A open to the floor with tenCube co-founder Darius Cheung and SingTel Innovation Exchange’s deputy director, Chong Lee Fong. Here’s your chance to ask them the hard questions, like, ‘How much did McAfee pay?’ or, ‘Why are carriers so hard to work with?’.

Accelerate 2010-tenCube party
Date: Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Time: 6.30pm to 9.30pm
Venue: Artery, Red Dot Traffic Building (nearest MRT is Tanjong Pagar)
Why: Celebrate tenCube’s sale to McAfee. Panel and Q&A with tenCube co-founder Darius Cheung and Chong Lee Fong, SingTel Innovation Exchange’s deputy director, moderated by e27’s new editor, Wong Joon Ian.
Goodies: Get a very special price on Accelerate 2010 tickets at the party. Drink free beer.
Register here

Hong Kong startups come together: A StartUP Saturday report

When I landed in Hong Kong last Thursday, I was initially struck by the similarities between Singapore and Hong Kong when it comes to business environment. Both cities are major financial hubs in Asia, have very open economies, great supporting infrastructure and legal systems in place, and what’s more – they are among the top five cities in the world to do business, according to the World Bank. Keeping this in mind, I attended StartUP Saturday to check out the startup ecosystem in Hong Kong.

While Hong Kong and Singapore are great for business in general, the startup scenes in both cities couldn’t be more different. Jonathan Buford, a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur and one of StartUP Saturday’s organizers, wrote that Singapore’s startup scene is “perhaps five years ahead of HK in development timeline”. Lack of a strong community, funding options and support structures were some of the reasons behind this notion.

But, from witnessing first-hand the largest startup event in HK and meeting local entrepreneurs and incubators – I can conclude that the Hong Kong startup scene is definitely ramping up and it points towards bigger things to come.

StartUP Saturday was organized by the StartupsHK group – a community of Hong Kong startup founders who meet up on a regular basis to discuss the vagaries of startup life. What started off as a casual meet-up of about 10 people ballooned into a 400-strong event. They are now planning on making StartUP Saturday an annual affair.

StartUP Saturday Report

The event was kick-started by an introduction to the IncuTrain program (more on that in the next post) – an incubation and training program for digital media startups. Following that was a keynote by Douglas Young, co-founder of GOD, a contemporary retail and design shop. Although the keynote was not technology oriented, Young shared his learning on the importance creating strong identities with the brand or product you are building.

The Keynote was followed by a StartUP Panel discussion between Arthur Chow (co-founder of 6 Waves), Kevin Huang (CEO of Pixel Media), Andy Ann (CEO of Darizi Media) and Terry Tsang (Co-founder of Pencake Limited). Moderated by Gene Soo (Co-founder of StyleNearBy), the panel mainly touched upon the various stages of the startup cycle. From getting funding to acquiring customers. Discussion mainly veered towards how to move from idea to execution from the lessons they learned.

The other interesting panel was the funding panel which consisted of Douglas Glen (Hong Kong-based angel investor), James Giancotti (director of investments at Excitin), Tony Chan (founder of AP Deal Flow) and Ken Ko (CEO of Lakoo). The discussions started with a report on existing grants and matching funds available for entrepreneurs in Hong Kong.

There are three main funds:

- Inno-tech grant: matching fund up to HK$350,000 (US$45,000)

- InnoCentre grant: matching fund up to HK$350,000 (US$45,000)

- SERAP: matching grant up to HK$4 million (US$515,000)

Most entrepreneurs I met in Hong Kong acquired funds by bootstrapping through “three F’s” or by doing consulting on the side. They unanimously lamented the lack of seed funding to get their businesses started.

“[The] investment climate in Hong Kong is bad and the most investors here are likely to invest in China-based startups, ” Frederick Yung from the Hong Kong Science Technology Park said.

The other major aspect of the event were the startup pitches. There were 18 pitches in total. You can find the entire list of startups here.

Personally, from all the pitches, I found the following products interesting:

- Pandaform: One of the echelon 2010 launchpad startups. It is a simple online professional form builder and manager.
- ResumeTracker: Personalized career site to handle job applications and to manage applicant information for SME’s.
- StyleNearby: iPhone app that enables shoppers to discover unique boutiques, follow designers and check out different style-related events in town.
- Spoilt: Online retailer of unique experience gifts in Hong Kong offering consumers a portfolio of experiences across the categories of Water, Flying, Outdoor, Gourmet, Creative and Pampered.
- PhotoGoodness: Digital photography management and manipulation application, built from the ground up for photography enthusiasts with DSLR cameras.
- Enterproid: Android-based technology that enables professionals to consolidate work and personal life onto a single enterprise grade device.

You can watch some of the interview with startup founders here

What was probably the biggest highlight of the event was that BootHK secured funding just minutes later after co-founder Jon Buford (yes, the same guy who helped organize StartUP Saturday) pitched it on stage. BootHK is a community and co-working space for startups and makers. It is the equivalent of Hackerspace in HK. Their first space will be in Sheung Wan and they managed to get a commitment of US$16,000 from members and supporters.

All in all the event had a great vibe going on about it and the excitement was palpable. It has definitely set a precedent for bigger and better things to happen in the Hong Kong startup space.

GeekCamp Singapore – Call for Speakers

GeekCamp Singapore is back, and better than ever!

And this time with multiple tracks, more talks and even a coding contest.

History of GeekCamp Singapore

Like all important things in the world, it all started with a tweet from Kamal saying, “I’m going to run GeekCamp. All technical talks, single track. No offense to marketers, *preneurs, social media experts but you can suck it.”

What started off as a tweet then turned into a huge technology meet-up in KL, after which, Jason Ong brought this event to Singapore in August 2009 — that turned out to be a rip-roaring fun event as well. Attendees of last year’s event will vouch for the great hallway conversations they had during talks which sparked further ideas and projects.

This year’s version of Geekcamp will have multiple-track sessions with pure technical talks ranging from face-recognition algorithms to building a touch-table interface.

Register for GeekCamp Singapore here.

GeekCamp Singapore will be held on 4 Sept at SMU School of Information System.

We are looking for speakers who are willing to share their technical expertise. If you think you’ve worked on a cool hack, (either in your spare time or at work) or have learned something insanely great, we (and fellow geeks in Singapore) would love to hear from you.

So don’t be shy, get away from your computer and spend a great day at GeekCamp. Interested speakers – please email Jason at velvetpd[at]gmail[dot]com