Ladies and Gentlemen, e27 is hosting a exclusive meet-up session of Startup founders with James Hong, serial-investor and co-founder of one of the defining dating sites of this era – Hot or Not, which logs about 20 Million page views per day! Am sure none of us need any introduction to this site. Started by two young UC Berkley graduates,  Hot or Not went ahead to sell for a rumored $20 million in 2008. Annual revenue was estimated at $5 million, with net profits of $2 million. He’s also an investor in Slide, Mochi Media, Raptr, Crunchyroll, BitTorrent, Frappr, OneSeason, and multiple other startups.

Meet the man behind this startup and get to hear his stories and insights. Also learn from his perspectives from being on both sides of the spectrum, as an entrepreneurs and as an investor.

Due to venue constraints and to ensure quality conversation, we are limiting the attendance to only 30 founders. If you are a startup founder and interested in attending this meetup, RSVP NOW!

Meetup Details

Date/Time : Thursday, March 11th 2010 / 6pm onwards

Venue: Garag3, NUS

RSVP : First 30 people to RSVP/comment on this post!

Looking forward to free flow of great conversations and loads of fun!

[Picture Courtesy: Wired]

Great coverage of the event by Yahoo >> Link here

Interested participants can sign up at the following sites:

Singapore
Date: Tuesday, 9th March 2010
Location: Meritus Mandarin Orchard, Ballroom 1
Details: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/singapore

Kuala Lumpur:
Date: Thursday, 11th March 2010
Location: Hilton Hotel, Ballroom A, Kuala Lumpur
Details: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/malaysia

More Details: http://cse-sea.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-analytics-master-class-is-back.html

From what I heard, last years class in Singapore (which was the first in Southeast Asia) was way oversubscribed, hence I think this year’s one will be too. So do sign up early!

The agenda for the Singapore event is attached below for easy reference. See ya there!

The online payment gateway sector has always been a tough nut to crack. It’s almost akin to the OS market of yore – dominated by huge players; better systems don’t necessarily equate to higher market share and the industry is bogged down by rampant bugs and the lurking danger of fraudulent activity. But as is the case with many technology companies based in the western hemisphere, Paypal – the dominant player in the market hasn’t quite figured out the elixir in the Asian market and the result is that many other dominant country-specific players have emerged in this region. China has Alipay, Malaysia has MOL and Singapore has eNETS.

SinaptIQ and 2C2P

2C2P, a startup under MDA’s iJam Scheme is now entering the Singapore space and has started with baby steps in the right direction by getting into partnership with UOB.

Aung Kway Moe, founder of 2C2P is an established entrepreneur in Thailand. He founded SinaptIQ in 2003 which expanded into three subsidaries of which one of them – Paysbuy was bought over for THB 85M by a Thailand Mobile operator, Total Access Communications (DTAC).

The other subsidaries of SinaptIQ – DCC and 2C2P focuses on different aspects of e-commerce. Dynamic currency converter (DCC), as the name suggests is a real-time application that gives users a choice of paying in Thai Baht or a foreign currency. Its transaction volume breached THB2.0b in Sept 2009 . 2C2P on the other hand focuses on providing Cybersource-esque services in Asia by mainly providing credit card processing, payment gateway solutions and dispute management services.

Established in 2007, 2C2P is a joint-venture between Douglas Abrams and Aung Kway Moe. When asked about why he chose Singapore as the destination to launch 2C2P, he mentioned that Singapore market is open to new transaction-based payment solutions and also sees larger access to funds here.

Singapore Payment Gateway market

In Singapore, the dominant players are Paypal, Worldpay and eNETS. eNETS – the homegrown payment gateway service co-owned by OCBC, DBS and UOB – allows payment through credit and debit cards. Though we are yet to see mass adoption of e-commerce by retailers in the SE-Asian region, Juniper Research estimates that the global transaction market will reach $587 billion by 2011, with much of the payment volume coming from Asia. Aung sees a tremendous opportunity to leverage here, and though he is expecting setbacks from the big players in this market, he is ready to launch 2C2P on a war footing.

Laurels

2C2P was a finalist in the Red Herring 100 Asia 2008 Awards for playing an “important role of technology in Asian economy and throughout the world.” They also won the “Nokia Calling All Innovators” competition in 2009.

Mobile payment solution

2C2P are also entering into the mobile payment market and they claim the solution “is like Square without the device” which to simply put, is like any other mobile solution in the market. Their mobile payment solution will be launched in Thailand on Feb 15th for which they have already acquired a partnership with Amway and they are hoping they can launch it in Singapore by the end of Q2 2010.

With a plethora of mobile payments solutions, e-commerce payment solutions and a variety of players in the value chain, it will definitely be an uphill task for 2C2P to break the mould. Though the solutions they provide are not path-breaking or revolutionary through any lens, it will definitely be great to see more players in this field.

Update: They are also listed as one of the finalists in the Red Herring 2009 Global Awards.

If you can’t view the video, click here

What issues must I know before starting up a company?

What is intellectual property and how do I make sound financial projections?

How can I do marketing that is both cost effective and creative?

If you have any of these burning questions, get it answered at Start-Up@Singapore’s Enterprise Series I & II.

Enterprise Series I:

This session will focus on the foundations of starting a business, particularly in Singapore, and the opportunities that are available in terms of funding, mentorship and other forms of guidance and support. Workshops conducted will focus on business development in Singapore and intellectual property management. This event will leave the audience with a clearer picture of the local entrepreneurship scene, so they are better equipped to formulate their business idea in accordance with the regulations and pro-enterprise initiatives presented in Singapore.

Enterprise Series II:

Enterprise Series 2, will be touching on some hard skills that first-time entrepreneurs will need to succeed in the field. Topics such making sound financial projections, creative marketing and leveraging on social media for business development will be covered.

These events will be held at Geylang East Library on Jan 8th/9th. Register for the events at http://events.startup.org.sg/

Held in conjunction with CES2010, It’s a networking opportunity for mobile developers and an informal session for Samsung to share more details on the company’s position on operating systems, its new Bada platform as well as plans for an Application Store in Singapore.

Samsung executives will be on-site to host you and discuss possible opportunities for collaboration. Here are the details for the event:

• Date: Friday, January 8 2010,
• Time:  7 – 9pm
• Venue: Velvet Underground @ Zouk, 17 Jiak Kim Street, Singapore 169420

For further enquiries, please contact Julia Wei / Janice Wee of Edelman at (65) 6347 2327 / 6347 2315 or Julia[dot] wei [at] edelman [dot] com / janice [dot] wee [at] edelman.com.

Agile thoughts

The event was kick started with panel discussion on product process and software agility by Ian McFarland from Pivotal Labs, Diego Rodriguez from IDEO, Jay Dvivedi from Shinshei Bank and Elisabeth Hendrickson from Quality Tree Software. Agile Development unlike the normal SDLC, is a methodology based on collaboration, iteration and process adaptability. Pivotal labs and IDEO are strong proponents of this method and were advocating this to be adapted for most web-based startups. They shared interesting case studies of Youtube and Paypal who kept pivoting and evolving their system through this process and creating more value to their customers.

The discussion also led to how Agile development forces people to constantly build and not spend time talking about the various feature requests. These discussions on development methodologies also led to the usual complaint from many local entrepreneurs on how it’s hard to find good technical talent in Singapore, when Ian responded by saying that it’s not always about hiring smartest programmer but having a process to enable them to be better, which is exactly what Pivotal Labs aim to do.

Of Epic Fails  and chutzpah

With all the talk about agile development and how it led to a lot of success stories, the discussion naturally veered to what is Singapore lacking in terms of entrepreneurship? Eyal Gura from Israel had some interesting insights to share on why he thinks Singapore can be the third Silicon Valley (Israel being the second)

While Singapore and Israel share many similarities in terms of immigrant population, compulsory military service, small size of the country, there are also that many cultural differences. He mentioned how there was a rampant fear of losing face, no one questions authority and people here place high premium on politeness. But, most importantly what was needed for the entrepreneurs to succeed was “Chutzpah”. Chutzpah according to him helps lubricate the business process and he thinks Singapore is uniquely positioned to bring in global talent and also establish both early stage and growth equity discipline and to overcome the cultural challenges.

With all the talk about failing, one interesting speaker that managed to get all our attention was Johannes Grenfurthner who runs Monochrom – an art-technology-philosophy group in Vienna. With his stage presence and use of different yet interesting metaphors conveyed why it’s important to fail and had interesting points on why sometimes competition isn’t the right way to create something that people need. For more information on his talk, click here.

Diversity of crowd and talks

What I really enjoyed about the event was the amazing diversity of the crowd. People from different countries, culture and background were sharing their insights on diverse range of topics. On one hand you have Mitch Altman talking about making a one button device to switch off any TV in this world, and on the other hand you have 12 year old Max sharing his very valuable insights on what kids think about technology.

There was also the Mozilla Drumbeat challenge where people shared their idea on how to make the web better and explain open web in the most creative way. Preetam Rai who presented on reward management system for content won the challenge for the best idea category. Coleman Yee won in the category of explaining open web concept in the best way possible.

What this means to startups?

From this event, it was evident that there is an increasing emphasis on walking the talk a.k.a building products.  Joi Ito mentioned that he would be interested in investing in consumer internet Ruby on Rails startups, with about 50,000 users, that grows 20-30% month-on-month. With Pivotal labs setting up base in Singapore, it will enable a lot of creators to build products and take it to market and follow the process of agile development to continuously iterate.

With a set of quality mentors coming in to help the startups, an organization to enable better development process, and an incubator set up to fund these passionate people, looks like Singapore entrepreneurial eco-system is set to become more vibrant.

Image courtesy: http://thinkingandmaking.com/

Martell, INSEAD and Standard Chartered have joined forces and come up with an innovative startup competition that will award the winning idea with 760 sq feet of shop space, smack in the middle of The Cannery at Clarke Quay. Winners will also get an executive education program from INSEAD, “entrepreneur coaching” from Standard Chartered and once in a lifetime opportunity to represent Martell VSOP as their rising personality. We don’t usually cover non-web technology startup related news and events and I can’t even remember when was the last time we actually did that. But this event struck me, as I was very impressed with simplicity of the event’s concept and the type of awards/prizes that were given out.

Simplicity of the Event’s Concept
The idea behind the competition is simple; if you had a space in the middle of a busy area, what would you do with it. You submit your pitch in the form of a 60sec video; no executive summaries, no financials, no boring old business plans, just one plain video pitch and you’re done. The inertia to take part has to be tremendously reduced, especially when you know that you don’t have to prepare a whole set of documents that will end up getting scrutinized from every possible angle. The pitch and the idea gets personal because you’re the one pitching it, hence your idea isn’t subject to interpretation by someone reading an executive summary that you have written. And the best part is the whole social element around it and how your friends get to vote for your ideas and share it. It’s really about your support network and your fans pushing you to get working on the idea and get it started.

Type of Awards/Prizes
Too many startup related events these days provide large cash prizes to the winners ($20,000 is giving for renovating the shop though, but that’s it). Most of the time, the competition does not dictate what the winners have to do with the prizes. Interestingly for this one, the focus is on education instead of money. While startup essentials can’t exactly be taught, I believe that the lessons learned from INSEAD will go a long way in the founders current business, as well as any future startup he/she may wish to venture in. I know I am being pessimistic here but there’s a high chance that the winning idea may fail, just like every other startup venture. But the knowledge gained from INSEAD and Standard Chartered, together with the real world experience of running a business will definitely help the founder in his/her future ventures. It is an event/competition that is definitely worth supporting.

What would you do if you had the space? Submit you ideas now!

Andrew McGlinchey (Google Product Manager for South East Asia) will give an overview of Google’s Geo technologies and mainly, he will be giving a detailed talk on the Street view and its APIs. This will be followed by 2 Singapore-based companies sharing their experiences in incorporating Google Maps into their products. They will conclude with another brief demo.

Check out the details below:

SG-GTUG 3rd meet-up
Date: Saturday, December 5, 2009
Time: 11am – 1:30pm
Theme: Google Geo Technologies (Maps, Earth)
Location: Google Singapore, 8 Shenton Way 35th floor, Singapore 068811

Talk 1 + Demo 1 — Andrew McGlinchey: “Building the Geoweb together”
(Google Singapore)

Talk 2 + Demo 2 — Jeremy Lee: “Streetsine.com: A real-life usage of Google Maps as the primary organization technology for a property analytics portal in Singapore” (Streetsine)

Talk 3 + Demo 3 — Jon Petersen: “Geo-location on mobile devices” (Buuuk)

Talk 4 + Demo 4 — Mohit Sindhwani, Quantum Inventions

Demo 5 — Ritesh Kalra: “Online Delivery System, a Computing Innovation and Design Project”

RSVP @ http://tinyurl.com/sg-gtug3

We hope to see you at the event! Thank you and happy Googling!

You will gain a fresh perspective by drawing from successful angel trainers in various areas of writing and pitching business plans and equity financing mechanisms.  Learn the do’s and don’ts from the 2 angels’ personal experiences with start-ups they have invested and mentored.

Business Angels Network South-East Asia (BANSEA) in colloaboration with GEW will be holding their new venture creation workshop tomorrow on 19th Nov, 9:00 A.M – 1: 45 P.M.

Topics that will be covered for the workshop include:

* Business plan writing and pitching

* Causes of Entrepreneurship Failure – and How to avoid them

* Fund Raising Strategies & Understanding your Investor

* Funding requirements & Life Cycle

* Angels vs. VCs

* The Investment Process

* Plus real-life startup case studies

* Consultation session with business angels – Pierre Hennes and Wong Meng Weng

Interested applicants can mail kellyhan [at] bansea [dot] org quoting “E27 Guests”. Please note that due to limited free slots it will be on a first come first serve basis.

If you want to learn more about AWS, as well as understand how this will affect your startup, there will be a Singapore Web Technology Network meetup with Simone Brunozzi from AWS on November 26th. Organized by the NUS Linux Users’ Group and Azione Capital, this will be an excellent opportunity to get all your queries cleared, from Amazon’s representative itself. Details below:

Event: An Afternoon with Simone Brunozzi, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

Date and Time: November 26, 2009 @ 4:00 PM

Location:

What’s Next Studio, F11, Symbiosis Block, Fusionopolis

Singapore 138632

Singapore

(map here)

Agenda:

4.00pm Registration

4.30pm Presentation by Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services

5.15pm Discussion and Sharing

6.00pm End

Simone looks forward to share with the audience on the latest trends on cloud computing, Amazon Web Services, and intricate details about Amazon S3. He will also have an open discussion following his presentation with the participants.

About Simone Brunozzi

Simone Brunozzi is a technology enthusiast, involved in IT and computing since an early age.

He joined Amazon.com in March 2008 in the role of Web Services Evangelist, traveling across Europe and vicinity to showcase the innovative new solutions by Amazon Web Services and to help developers build businesses and applications. He is following the “Cloud Computing” paradigm shift since 2006, and believes that it is going to replace the traditional computing model in a few years.

Of Italian origins, Simone loves traveling, meeting people, and connecting with them. He is a Linux and Ubuntu passionate, loves blogging on www.brunozzi.com, and has interests in the environment, clean energies, and technology in general.

Prior to joining Amazon, Simone had his own business focusing on web applications. He also served as a professor of Programming Languages and Compilers at Perugia University and worked as a network and system administrator at the University for Foreigners in Perugia. Simone has a Computer Science degree and spent six months at UC Irvine, California, where he studied the American approach to business and science. He gained early programming experience at the Ministry of Aerial Defense in Rome, Italy.

About Grails

Grails is an Open Source Web framework which leverages on the Groovy programming language. Grails is an advanced and innovative open source web application platform that delivers new levels of developer productivity by applying principles like Convention over Configuration. It helps development teams embrace agile methodologies, deliver quality applications in reduced amounts of time, and focus on what really matters: creating high quality, easy to use applications that delight users. Grails naturally complements Java application development since it is built on Spring and based on Groovy, the leading dynamic language for the Java platform.

The event will be held at Singapore Management University, SIS Building, Room NSR 2.1 (Level 2) from 7.00 p.m.

Event: Grails in the Cloud
Date: Nov 18th, 7.00pm onwards
Location: Singapore Management University, SIS Building, Room NSR 2.1 (Level 2)

Best part of all is that Yahoo! is encouraging people from various regions to mingle and innovate by giving opportunities to talented developers around the region. They have done this through their regional developer selection campaign where they will be flying developers across the region to attend and hack at the event. They recently rounded up the selection process and 1 developer from each region (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Philippines) was picked for an all expenses paid trip to attend the event . We are proud to announce the 4 deserving developers who will be joining us in Jakarta next week.

From Singapore

Siddharth Singhal is a technology enthusiast driven by innovation. His work has gotten many accolades around the world by companies like Gemalto, Microsoft, British Telecom, Tata Consultancy Services, Freescale Semiconductors, N.P.L. , N.I.C.(India), A.U.V.S.I. etc.. . His last two ventures Indriyaan and Jal gained a lot of traction worldwide. While his primary work has been in the field of embedded systems, the objective driving him has been to enable better lives, through technology. He has worked on a variety of languages and platforms from assembly level, C in RTOSes, hobby robots etc. to developing entire solutions on Microsoft technologies for Imagine Cup’07 and ‘08.

From Malaysia

Nazrul swings on the web, life, culture and free open source software technology leading a life as a creative information technologist. An experienced Web designer & developer, he programmatical-ly uses his left brain to create & develop web applications and participate in open source projects munching Drupal cookies & Open Source cakes. On the right, he embraces chaos & simplicity in design.

From Vietnam

Chan is an 18-year old chap who works as a freelancer in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam. Having gone through an intensive-algorithm program in high school, he is now only interested in web technology and has since then, dabbled with Flash, PHP, JavaScript and web design. After his senior year, he decided to take a year off and work for Zoes Creative Studio as an IT Manager. However, with a great desire for technology, he longs to finish his science bachelor degree in KAIST University for the next four coming years. During his spare time, Chan. loves to travel and get his hands dirty with the traditional Japanese paper folding art called Origami. Check him out on Facebook and Twitter.

From Philippines

After a five-year stint as head of VAS and later, of Innovations, at Sun Cellular, Dominick Danao founded Happy.Mobile Corp., a mobile VAS content aggregator in the Philippines. Happy.Mobile is also into consulting services, listing as clients Nokia,Siemens Networks, Bayan Telecommunications (CDMA network), Bluemedia Communications (WiMAX provider), among others.

Mr. Danao’s primary success as an IT innovator and entrepreneur happened 10 years ago when he founded and ran Pinoymail Corp., a free e-mail company catering to Filipinos worldwide. The company was sold at the height of the dotcom era in 1999, making it one of the Philippines’ biggest tech stories at the start of the millenium.

He has now replaced a cozy corporate life for a startup and is back into writing code. Obviously, his main interest is mobile applications; however, of late, he has been working on casual games on Facebook and online social games for kids with his nine-year-old daughter, who is the “chief creative officer” in his nascent gaming company.

Launchpad 2009 aims to showcase great, game changing innovation in Asia. The platform provides the opportunity for startups to mingle with investors, fellow entrepreneurs, incubators etc. Apart from networking alone, there will be a pitching element to it as well. The top 5-10 startups will get an opportunity to pitch to top notch international investors from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Benchmark Capital and Google (more panelists will be confirmed). Pitching to them is good, but let’s hope they follow on with some funding please.

Companies interested in taking part can do so in the following manner:

(i) Submit a copy of their 1-minute elevator pitch to Junus Eu from Expara. Her email id is Junus [at] expara [dot] com. The email subject should be labelled as: “CFP for i.MATCH International by [Name of Company]”.

(ii) Submissions should include all relevant company information as requested above (this is based on the information available here).

(iii) Submissions received after the specified deadline (November 24th 2009) will not be considered.

Some of the overseas panelists for the event include:

Benchmark Capital – Jonathan Teo

Jonathan Teo has spent his career helping companies build distributed engineering organizations that enable technical teams and infrastructure to expand and scale globally.

Most recently he served as Engineering PM in the Search Properties and Enterprise Products groups at Google in Mountain View, and was an early member of its Strategy and Business Operations team. In both roles, he created highly leveraged engineering and product organizations in countries around the world, with a focus on expanding R&D to Asia and Eastern Europe. Prior to joining Google, he worked at Bain & Company, helping a Fortune 100 client optimize and grow its technical support organization. He also served as a consultant to Intuit, Electronic Arts and other technology companies, spent two years in the Republic of Singapore Air Force and was a founding member of a software development group focused on developing security protocols and analyzers. He currently holds patented work in the area of link layer security.

Jonathan’s investment areas cover enterprise software and infrastructure as well as mobile technologies. He is currently involved in investments in Twitter and Eucalyptus.

Education: M.S. from Stanford University. B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sydney University.

DFJ India – Mohanjit Jolly

Mohanjit Jolly has spent the last ten years working with and investing in technology startups. Prior to DFJ, Mohanjit was Managing Director at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed and early stage venture capital firm. While at Garage, Mohanjit worked with over 30 companies, including LeftHand Networks, PureSight (BCGI), Jibe Networks (CTRX), Qumu, Thermoceramix, Kaboodle (Acq: Hearst Media) and SimplyHired. Prior to joining Garage, Mohanjit was part of the strategic planning group at Mattel where he helped launch the Mattel/Intel joint venture, Intel Play. He also spent several years in both engineering and business development roles with Itek Optical Systems, a manufacturer of high-resolution reconnaissance systems for both military and commercial use. While earning his M.B.A from the Anderson School at UCLA, Mohanjit helped launch ViaSpace, a technology incubator in Southern California in conjunction with Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Mohanjit earned a B.S. and M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT, with a specialization in electric propulsion systems.

Google Corporate Development Group – Mike Pearson

Previously, he worked in investment banking with Goldman Sachs both in New York and London. Michael holds undergraduate degrees in Economics and Italian from Emory University and a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard. Michael joined the Corporate Development Group at Google in 2005 and is a senior member of the team responsible for all the company’s acquisitions and strategic minority investments. Prior to Google, Michael held positions at the private equity group McCown De Leeuw & Co focusing on investments in early stage companies.

Google: Corporate Development Group – Thomas Duterme

Tom is a Corporate Development Manager at Google. He focuses on acquisitions for Google in both the US and international markets. Tom previously worked in the New Business Development in Google and spearheaded early stage businesses for Google including Adsense for Games and also helped develop infrastructure partnerships for Google

Voice. Prior to joining Google, Tom helped launch two companies in the Internet space in China, playing the role of CTO and head of sales for each venture. While in China, Tom also helped multinational corporations negotiate market entries in the form of domestic acquisitions and joint ventures.

Tom graduated with a degree in physics from Macalester College. He also possesses an MBA from the MIT Sloan of Management. Tom is fluent in Mandarin and French, and has lived in China, Japan, France, Belgium, and various parts of the U.S.

Images courtesy: MDA