tenCube is the company behind the mobile security service, WaveSecure. Key features of WaveSecure include remotely locking your lost phone, tracking your lost phone (location, use, and even if a new SIM is inserted), auto-backup all of your mobile data, and remote wiping of all your data.

“Mobile devices have become an extension of our lives,” said Darius Cheung, chief executive officer, tenCube. “Through this acquisition, McAfee can broaden its security capabilities and offer users protection and remote control of the phone whether it is in their possession or not. This means no more worries about the whereabouts of your phone or losing personal contacts, photos or messages.”

WaveSecure was recently selected as the “Most Fundable Product” by over 40 top VCs in Silicon Valley and received a strategic investment of SGD1 million from India-based telecom application platform One 97 Communications.

tenCube was founded by National University of Singapore alumni Darius Cheung, Varun Chatterji and Rishi Israni. Their early investors include the Economic Development Board (EDB) and SPRING Singapore who supported them via the SEEDS and TECS fund respectively (see our list of regional government funding options for startups).

The acquisition is expected to close in August of 2010.

This is great news for the startup ecosystem in Singapore. Congratulations to Darius and his team.

In the past few months representatives from Koprol and Nexian have been spotted meeting in various locations — even as recently as last week at the Indonesia Cellular Show in Jakarta. Sources at Nexian say meetings with Koprol have taken place. Whether the meetings were centred on a distribution deal, however, could not be confirmed.

Koprol, a location-based social network based in Indonesia, is still on everyone’s lips following its acquisition by Yahoo! in May. It seems that Nexian is moving quickly to take advantage of the local aspect of its own and Koprol’s brands.

At the moment Nexian is second only to Nokia in terms of mobile phone sales in Indonesia thanks to its low to mid-end strategy. They have just released their first Android phone at ICS, the Nexian Journey, and even then the phone is aimed at the burgeoning mid-end market, priced at USD330.

It would be quite a big step for Koprol if it were to develop an app to be bundled into every Nexian phone. Koprol currently has a free app for BlackBerry devices but its service is available only from the web browser on all other phones.

As for Nexian, having Koprol as a partner would provide even more leverage over its local and international competitors. Nexian phones already come pre-loaded with a Nexian messenger app, which is similar to BlackBerry’s Messernger, which is pre-loaded on all its devices. If Nexian had a location-based service coupled to complement its messaging platform, the resulting hybrid could create a  compelling application.

Also see:

The Journey of Koprol – How it all Began

Koprol Leading the Location Based Social Networking Wave in Asia?

Yahoo! Acquires Koprol, Foursquare of Indonesia

On one hand, we have PR agencies catered towards improving the ‘image’ or perception of corporate companies. We have professional image consultants who specifically help you project a professional image and exude confidence in business and social settings. What do we have for undergraduates or new graduates who will be transitioning from their comfortable, laid back student roles to the confident, hungry corporate roles? Gradkin! The personal branding platform exclusively catered exclusively for students.

You might have seen myriad evidences of employees being fired from their workplace for putting up drunk photos when they were supposed to be on MC. What Gradkin lets you do is to showcase your talents, while eliminating the incriminating photos on Facebook. Gradkin is a professional Branding and Networking platform for students and graduates to connect with employers. Creating a professional looking online brand is so important in today’s age as social media becomes more pervasive.

The Gradkin is currently running a contest to encourage students to cultivate a personal brand online and go in the draw to win an Apple iPod Touch. Details of the contest, here. The contest ends April 16th so do cultivate your personal brand online right away.

Uber cool Singaporean startup, Tencube, just launched their WaveSecure product offering for the Android Platform. That’s one up for all you Android users out there. While iPhone users (crap, I’m one of them!) have to contend with losing all their data and getting their privacy breached when they lose their phones, Android users can easily recover their lost data, swipe their phones clean and backup all those sensitive information on the WaveSecure servers. Check out the video below on how it’s done:

Here’s a quick recap of the features available:

1. Lock your phone remotely to prevent unauthorized access to your phone
   
2. Track your phone’s location and the SIM changes in your phone (even if your phone is not with you!)
3. Backup your contacts, SMS, media and call logs
4. Restore your contacts and SMS
5. Remotely wipe your data on your phone and memory card

Download the beta app for FREE. The best part is that you get to keep the app permanently for free, if you download it during it’s beta period. Enjoy!

Roboscuba, a robotic submarine that allows you to dive with real fishes, launched with a handful of fishes in its tank. I got a chance to meet up with Thomas Tan, Founder of MakeAffinity, who showed me a demo of how the entire thing works. I must say that it was pretty interesting controlling a submerged robot, while looking at the fishes, which were put in there by the community (yes you can add your own real life fishes in the tank).

It is also great to know that this is the first “non-MakeAffinity” robot plugged into the system. It’s a significant milestone for Thomas as all the current robots in the system were put in by himself. MakeAffinity’s platform is designed such a way that anyone with their own robots can plug into the MakeAffinity’s API and get their robots on MakeAffinity’s platform. Users around the world can play with these robots by buying credits. The revenue earned from the credits will be split between MakeAffinity and the owner of the robot. Before we get into the platform and talk about why it is a game changer, let’s first understand the merger of offline and online environments.

The Merger of Environments – Offline and Online
The concept of merging both the physical and virtual environment isn’t entirely new. The notion of plugging yourself to a terminal and controlling something  virtually, from a remote location, has been discussed in science fiction books and demonstrated in research labs. The Huggy Pajamas project by the Mixed Reality Labs is one such example. This concept of “merger of environments” has moved to mobile as well, whereby virtual environments are augmented onto real ones. Augmented reality, the new hot feature in mobile applications, accomplishes that by merging online content with the offline environment. BuUuk’s new iPhone app demonstrates that really well.

How is MakeAffinity of Value Then?
The concept of “merger of environments” is particularly interesting for MakeAffinity and Roboscuba. For example, one could fit the technology in MakeAffinity with Roboscuba and apply it to tourism industry, whereby tourists can get a sneak preview of the Great Barrier Reef to entice them to sign up for traveling packages in Australia. Ever tried firing a GPMG? Well, theoretically you can hook a robot to a gun, connect it to MakeAffinity, and people can buy credits to shoot the gun virtually at a range. All this done in a controlled and safe environment. Similar experiential concepts are already being done. For example Joker Racer, a  Japanese startup recently featured on TechCrunch, combines Wi-Fi-enabled model cars equipped with a GPS so that users can virtually race cars through their browsers. This could potentially revolutionize how people play and socialize online.

Realizing this dream is something Thomas hopes to achieve through this platform,which he developed himself. It is  an uphill task, considering that robots will have to be made by users first and then “plugged” into the system. Roboscuba is a first step in that direction and time will only tell if this model will work or not.

And just today, we hear that Socialwok, one of the pitching companies at the unConference Singapore 2009 event we organized in May, won the Demopit of TechCrunch50. Among the loads of startups there, they were picked by the Silicon Valley community to be one of the winners of the Demopit section alongside Odesk and Clynde.

That’s a hat trick for Singapore and a big boost to the fledgling startup industry here!

I recently commented how the lack of exposure to Singapore based startups have been hampering growth in general. We have a decent number of great technology companies with excellent concepts and implementations, but low users. Until there is a way for startups to get connected to a bigger ecosystem with a lot more early adopter users, who will try out products from startups, share them with their friends and provide comments to improve them, the user growth number will more or less remain stagnant, with a very low probability of the typical hockey stick growth observed by successful Silicon Valley startups.

What Can Startups Do About This?
Getting your startup exposed out there is all about leveraging the big guys. As Ming Yong from Socialwok pointed out, distribution is key! By working with platforms such as GTUG, BizSpark and a whole other range of groups, your startup will get the early exposure it needs. Events is definitely another great way to leverage on to. Although we do have a lack of events here, there are a decent number of good quality ones where startups can interact with the web technology community. The quality of the events in Singapore is definitely on par with those run in the valley.

I often hear of startups complaining that it’s pointless going for events all the time. I seriously disagree with this. Events are the best way to meet people. You never know who you may meet and how introductions can happen. Events are also a great place to get feedback on your product and get inputs from potential clients. Events get your startup out there and put a face to the brand name.

Socialwok, iTwin and HomeCamera definitely made the right choices by getting into events. Kudos to them and kudos to the startups in Singapore! :)

These are the guys who made HomeCamera, the award winning web-cam monitoring solution which we recently covered on e27.

HomeCamera just bagged this year’s prestigious International Engineering Consortium InfoVision Innovation Award in the ‘Content, Entertainment, Applications, and Services’ Category. This was announced in Paris at the Broadband World Forum 2009, one of the largest telecommunications events for the broadband.

It’s 2 great achievements for the Singapore startup ecosystem in 1 action packed day!

Broadband World Forum 2009, an event organized by the International Engineering Consortium, is an industry standard high level event that is attended by the bigwigs like CEO of Ericsson, COO of Nokia Siemens Networks, and SVP of Orange in the broadband and telecommunications industry. This year’s event drew attendees by the thousands and showcased more than 100 operator companies from all over the world.

What makes winning even sweeter for Varun, the Founder and CEO of Pechora Technologies, is that Pechora Technologies was the only winning company from South East Asia. To add a touch of icing to that, it was the only company of it’s size in the winners rostrum and he got to share the stage with mega-corporations like Motorola, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson, Fujitsu, and Huawei.

Singapore startups are definitely outshining the competition on the global stage. At the rate we’re going, we could potentially see an interesting acquisition of some sort in the near future.

When Mohan approached me to write a guest post to share with other startups my experience in starting up, I was wondering what I could share with others about Voiceroute and now Socialwok.

One of the biggest challenge for any startup is getting your product or service out to the world with as much traction and as quickly as possible. The solution is the three Ds; distribution, distribution and distribution.

To get a little more context to my emphasis on distribution, please read the motochan blog post by my good friend James Chan. If you look at history of startups that became great companies, they all found the kaya to their white bread :) Google did keyword search for Yahoo users while Paypal was the stickiest payment system for Ebay users. Below are 4 key advice I have for all startups when it comes to thinking about distribution and how I have executed on my own advice.

1) You often gain much more when you share
Many startups are often fearful of sharing any of their technology or experiences. They are afraid that sharing will reveal their “trade secret” and remove any competitive advantage. If some basic sharing would kill your perceived “competitive advantage”, this barrier of entry against your competition is probably crap anyway.

My first product for Voiceroute was Druid; one of the world’s leading open source unified communications project built on top of Asterisk (world’s leading open source IP telephony software). Druid was initially a closed sourced graphical user interface that helped people setup Asterisk based IP phone systems. Our key challenges was marketing Druid to enough paid users and resellers who would deploy the software commercially. We took the strategic but difficult decision to open source Druid. Shortly after open sourcing in April 2008, we gained significant media coverage as well as user base. Although it still took a lot of work and time to build a critical mass of open source users, it was obvious in retrospect that we should have open-sourced it much earlier.

2) Stand on the shoulder of giants
The technology niche that your startup occupies in today’s web 2.0/3.0 world is of limited lifespan. You are lucky if that is 12 months or more. Most of the time you will have to leverage on existing technology platforms from open source projects or large players like Google and Facebook.

For our product, Socialwok for Google Apps, we decided early on to build our enterprise social cloud service using Google’s AppEngine Java, Google Data API and Google Web toolkit (GWT). Google is the obvious giant upon whose shoulder Socialwok is standing on. To increase Socialwok’s profile in the Google technology ecosystem as well as to deepen our links with Google, Socialwok became the corporate sponsor for the Singapore Google Technology User Group. We helped to lead the first SG-GTUG meetup (29 Aug 2009 at Google SG) on Google AppEngine and Google Web toolkit. For more details on the 1st SG-GTUG event, see this blog post (link here) as well as video of the whole event (link here).

We will also be presenting our experiences on Google AppEngine Java on 16 Sept 09 at Googleplex during the the Silicon Valley Java User Group September meetup. To date, the exposure and relationships we have gained to date have been quite invaluable.

3) Know as early as possible what is the true value of your product. Confirm that value by iterating with your lead users. Do not be afraid to take big leaps! It’s part of being a startup.
Your product or service will gain traction with the audience that finds the most value using it. You need to know what are the real tangible benefits that you deliver, to what type of audience and why do they like it. Whatever you think is the answer, it is probably wrong until you have confirmed it with on the ground testing. This is an an iteratively process; hypothesize the value and the type of lead user, test the use case, evolve your product and repeat.

The first version of Socialwok was a closed group enterprise microblogging tool, which we launched in May 2009 at unConference Singapore 2009. You can refer to this Socialwok blog post for more details on our experiences at the conference. Shortly after, we conducted our closed alpha trials with over 80 organizations. We observed their usage of Socialwok very closely. It is a myth that people will give feedback to help you make your service better. Most people will just use the service, get dissatisfied and stop using after a while without any feedback given. It is your responsibility to call, email and bug them until you understand what are the problems.

Fast forward 4 months to Sept 2009, we now have Socialwok for Google Apps. You can refer this article by ZDNet Asia on how Socialwok for Google Apps is filling the missing social layer for Google Apps. You can compare and contrast between both versions of Socialwok as shown by their respective demo videos below.

It’s a world of difference. We have made a few big strategic decisions based mainly on our intuitive of the changing technology landscape as well as a deep understanding of our own competitive capabilities. So far, things are looking good :)

As part of taking my own advice about sharing, Socialwok will be exclusively partnering with e27 to share with the Asian technology community our experiences at this year’s TC50 taking place from 14-15 September 2009 where Socialwok will be demo-ing Socialwok for Google Apps. Socialwok will be tweeting #tc50sg, Facebooking and of course video podcasting from the event. We will be doing interviews with other interesting startups, bloggers and attendees of TC50. Please tweet with the harsh tag #tc50sg to let us know what you would like us to cover. Please keep a watch out for a later post from e27.sg announcing the details of this coverage.

Introducing, FAME (Famous Market Exchange) as the NASDAQ of Social Networking!

FAME is the first virtual stock exchange of people where anyone can incorporate their personality as stocks. Users like your friends or yourself can be traded like any other counters in this free-to-play social game with virtual FAME dollars. Popular personalities will rise in price and their share can be owned. The game is also accessible from FameXC.com as an independent website where players can log in via Facebook Connect.
FAME, like other publishers is positioned as social game that enables trading of virtual shares of players, celebrities or even a prediction on the winner of the next F1 race, but only based on real stock exchange features.

FAME’s incentives for players to participate, is an iPod touch which is the top prize in FAME lottery draw, in which players with higher profits have better chances. FAME is also a marketing and publicity enabler for their corporate customers, and functions as a simulation tool that educates the public on stock trading.

FAME Beta was launched in April 2009 after a year of development, and exhibited their product in e27’s annual unConference. They also have close to 3200 beta testers as of July 2009. The beta product was selected as one of the top 50 finalists in Facebook Fund 2009 out of more than 400 applications, and they were Singapore’s first and only startup finalist, besides that, they were also featured on CAN, Digital Life and TODAY. Being in the top 50 is exciting for the Fame folks because it reinforced their belief in themselves and gave them more energy and vigor to make FAME a more exciting and all-encompassing game. Besides, the USD$1000 advertising credit came in very handy for their upcoming marketing campaign.

Encouraged by the success stories from several early movers, FAME thinks its is possible to monetize as a participant on the platform, due to the sheer size of active users on Facebook. Some cynics pointed out that the market is too saturated, but the team believes there is still space for innovating new applications and business models, as well as improvising the existing ones.
The team is also developing games for Friendster, Myspace and XiaoNei soon.

Currently, they are learning more about OpenSocial support and are looking at bringing this games to as many platforms as possible. At the same time, bringing the players back to their independent site, FameXC.com, where their accounts can still be accessed outside of social media site (unless their workplace block certain social media sites). Players from different networks will then be converged into a single platform and can have their accounts merge if they wish to.

The FAME team has their lucky stars to thank despite their disappointments, exhausted resources and family pressure because these guys stuck to their guns and remained faithful to their vision, even when things got challenging . These guys believe that the direction forward now is to simplify the game further without the gist of a stock market. And they will soon explore the waves of Twitter gaming and Mobile platforms. FAME is currently in their 2.5 version, but do look out for the Beta 3.5, which will be more real-time and collaboration-enabling in upcoming weeks; they are also finalizing a dividends payment systems as well as more ‘badges’ for their worthy players.

FAME aside, SOCIALICO Pte Ltd was founded with an aim of becoming a recognized icon in the social networking industry, through creation of interesting social games and applications. Using FAME as their flagship product, SOCIALICO has plans to create complementary games in upcoming months.

Look out for these guys as they will definitely be shining in the gaming world, in the coming years.

Paul Graham in his most recent essay talks about the failure of the Segway. While the Segway has always given geeks wet dreams (Did you know it has 15 gyroscopes? Gasp!), it’s never really taken off in the commercial sense. Paul Graham attributes it to the fact that you look dorky; you look elitist; and you look lazy when you use one. This in turn, is caused by the fact that Segway were so well funded right from the start that it did need to be open and did not need to talk to actual users and it did not have to iterate over failed designs.

Which is a decent segue (excuse the pun) to the notion of openness of startups: how open must startups be? Or rather how involved must users be in the evolution of a startup? There are many startups, (especially in the post dot-com-bust phase), who are very open about their design process. FriendFeed even (or rather used to, I just realized they aren’t very active with it now) posts changelogs of their core product source code so that users can get a feel for FriendFeed’s evolution. FriendFeed founders are incredibly approachable people as well and they are always engaging users in constructive discussion over how the product must evolve.

But must that be the golden path for all startups? Apple have taken the opposite path and have cultivated a cult of secrecy to become almost fashionable – Apple being one of the very few technology companies from Silicon Valley to not embrace blogs or Twitter. It took a Senior Editor at Forbes to blog on the Apple CEO’s behalf.

It becomes very easy for entrepreneurs who are a little green behind the ears, to take the user’s word as gospel and change the direction of the product based on the opinions of some users. Or an even more dangerous path for a startup founder to take is to try and please all kinds of users, when the right response must be ‘Sorry, maybe you aren’t our kinda user’.

The best way (as always) seems to be a middle path and to not ape any approach but pick one which suits you best. Paul Buchheit (who created GMail and is one of the founders of FriendFeed) sums it up best, when he says that it’s not just enough to listen to users, but to understand why they are saying it – so I will leave you to watch this video (from Startup School 2008)

Launched on the 3^rd of July 2009, Footballopod has made waves in Singapore’s amateur football scene with their online networking website, dedicated in providing a platform for amateur football. Judging from the way things are going, this platform looks pretty damn solid. Since the website’s launch, 130 teams have already registered and the numbers are increasing with each passing day.

Sharing a brief insight with e27 as to how Footballopod came about, founder and midfielder of the Questra Vipers football club, Tan Liyu, explained that the website is simply driven by “our passion our dream” which in abbreviation spells opod as reflected as part of the site’s address. Before Footballopod, amateur football in Singapore was practically non-existent in the virtual world; however with the introduction of this site the process of unification of the local amateur football scene is ignite. Footballopod.com prides itself as playing the integral part of being the middle-man between the teams, pitch vendors and the general public. This site offers amateur teams the opportunity to be known to the mass public, as teams are able to create their own team profile with detailed individual players profile for the public to view. From the team profile created, teams are also able to challenge other teams within the community for friendly matches through one of the main feature in the site which is the Match Arrangement Engine.

Footballopod also adopts a similar concept to Soccernet, but instead of news covering the professional world of soccer, the site covers news, updates and live scores on the Singapore’s amateur football scene. What’s impressive about this site is that it has an extensive data on the local amateur football scene, which is reflected in the amateur football directory. This directory features an extensive database of teams, leagues and most importantly pitch venues, thus from here users can find any desired information on the teams players, team’s past honors and even information on the pitch itself.

Other interesting elements on Footballopod features section such as “Team of the week”, “Feature League” and “OPOD SNAP! The dedicated team of Footballopod travels all around Singapore, sitting in amateur league matches snapping photos and deciding on the team that will be named “Team of the Week”, which then will be featured on the homepage of the site. This achievement for amateur footballers can be as close any winning any major glory.

In order to realize his dream, Liyu mentioned during the interview that he left his job at Accenture to pursue this on a full time basis. The site has barely been launched for a week and the Founder of Footballopod.com has already stated his future ambitions and plans to expand the site across the region.

Supported by the Football Assocation of Singapore, Footballopod.com can be considered a vital installment just as important as any youth academies in Singapore, as this provides the youth and possibly the future of Singapore’s footballing talent, something to play for. You never know as the next Fandi or Sundram maybe emerging among the ranks of the amateur league.

In the lead-up to the unConference, we speak with some of the speakers who will be present at the unConference. Today, we talk to Wong Hoong An, founding member of popular, local foodie site HumgryGoWhere.com. Hoong An will be on the panel discussing Asian innovation at the unConference.

e27: Can you give our readers a short introduction about yourself and what you do?

Hoong Ann: I am one of the co-founders of the website HungryGoWhere.com and my role in the company is in the   areas of sales and marketing, finance, public relations and legal affairs.

e27: Now, you’ve done a lot of things, you were in defense technologies, a capitol hill intern and apparently, you have a real passion for the arts. How do you think these experiences contribute to what you do now?

Hoong Ann: Exposure in many areas is always a positive as long as you have a good learning attitude towards everything in life. The lessons I learnt from each job and my activity in my life has shaped the person I have become and the decision I make in running this business.

e27: Do you believe in variety being the spice of life even when it comes to work? Would you say its related to your belief about being a student for life?

Hoong Ann: Yes. Our office is a crazy bunch of guys and I believe that a lot of my staff enjoy working with me because we always try to make work as interesting as possible. At the end of the day, we must be able to take our work seriously but take ourselves not too seriously.

e27: There’s this massively prevalent stereotype that Asians are great copiers, but not innovators. What would you say to that?

Hoong Ann: Well, there are certain truths to that as prevalent in the manufacturing and auto industries, but like many statements that is just a stereotype as there are many Asian innovators too – although I have to say that Asians tend to be better associated with taking an existing product and making it better

e27: How would you encourage the younger generation to take an interest in innovation and entreprenuership especially when the emphasis so far is on excelling academically not creatively?

Hoong Ann: I do not believe in doing that. A true entrepreneur will still do what he believes in with or without any encouragement.

e27: Perhaps you could tell us about why you started Hungrygowhere.com, what was the inspiration behind it and what motivated you?

Hoong Ann: To a certain extent it has to be craziness. A few years ago, I found it lacking that there was no readily available site that could give me information on restaurants at the snap of the finger and I thought that it would be a great resource to have one. Moreover, I believe that there is a lack of a strong channel for restaurants to market themselves efficiently and I felt that there was a big market on that.

e27: I noticed that Hungrygowhere has gone to Hong Kong, KL, Sydney and Melbourne. So many local talents have lamented about how hard it is to break into overseas markets. What would you say to that? Have you faced any obstacles in bringing Hungrygowhere.com overseas?

Hoong Ann: I agree that it is difficult to break into the overseas market. In fact, I still find it difficult today.  This is because every market has its share of cultural differences which will affect how I position the site. At this stage, I would not even dare say that I have “successfully” brought my site overseas. It is a work in progress but I believe that it can be done – through the right use of partnerships or money.

e27: As a conclusion, where do you see hungrygowhere.com in say, 3 years time? What are your future plans for it, if you have any?

Hoong Ann: In three years time, HungryGoWhere.com will probably be used both online as well as on the mobile phone. I hope to create a “one-stop site” for Hungry people – where people can find a place to dine, or have the food brought to them. But then again, we must also be flexible to changing strategies and tact and who knows, the final outcome may be a totally different one.

This article is part of a feature series on prominent attendees of  unConference 2009 on May 16th. Follow the event on twitter here. (event hashtag: #unconf2009)

Paul Graham of YCombinator and Lisp fame wrote about great hackers as people who really love to program and someone whom you definitely want around in your high tech startup.

In his essay, he notes that the “most important tool to a hacker is probably his office” and goes on elaborating why certain workspaces like cubicles aren’t ideal for hackers to be productive in.

Wired News published an article about “Hacker Spaces” which are areas stocked with tools and parts which hackers use to make stuff.

From the same article, you can find a link to a list of “Hackerspaces” worldwide:

From this list of 205 hackerspaces worldwide, I’ve counted:

1 x India

1 x Indonesia

1 x Japan

1 x Malaysia

1 x Vietnam

5 hacker spaces from a total of 205.

Do we see a trend here?

What makes a hackerspace? It could be as simple as just a simple room of tools and parts anyone could use.

With lots of money promoting entrepreneurship in Asia, there does not seem to be much hackerdom being embraced here.

While it might be easy launch a tech startup, let’s not forget the most important ingredient in one.

Add hacker, stir, mix and serve.

Paypal, an eBay company acquired in 2002, finally launched a local website. Check out the new PayPal Singapore website – they’ve added some new features just for Singapore users.

Some of the new features available at this local paypal site are:

• topping up your account with funds from local banks
• Fast & secure payments on eBay.com.sg.
  PayPal is now seamlessly integrated in the checkout process. Buyers can pay for items instantly without sharing financial details and sellers can accept payments from all major credit cards.
• Improved navigation and content organization!

Paypal users, rejoice! Non-Paypal users, why not make use of this opportunity to take a tour and find out how to make online payments less of a hassle for yourself! Find out more!

5-6 years ago, Silicon Valley’s overinflated tech egos caused a market crash. This time, its someone else but the result is the same. Except, there are warning signs this recession could turn out to be longer and more painful.

As blood pressures of startup CEOs increase and their hairlines recede, venture capitalists are out hoping to save the day — by providing good advice… and early justifications on why they will not return your call for the foreseeable future. ;P And these are the nice ones, we hope you have better luck finding guardian angels..

Sequoia Capital has a very long but comprehensive 56-slide presentation on all kinds of economic indicators that explain what this recession means in a macroscopic view. The middle and ending slides focus on what startups can do about it, with case studies of some tech companies.

Then, there’s Benchmark Capital, with a more readable and honest-to-goodness advisory piece (on TechCrunch) on what startup founders should do and pay attention to. For the benefit of those of you who dun have time, copy and paste the following and save it as your wallpaper for the next week. These are words of wisdom from a 2003 startup CEO who laid off 78% of his staff and lived to tell his IPO success story…

1. You don’t realize how fast things spin out of control. There are self?
reinforcing negative affects in a downturn.
2. Don’t spend money until you have to
a. Don’t move out of your office until you are sitting on top of one
another
b. Don’t hire any incremental employee until you just can’t stand it
c. Don’t get more capacity in your data center until your site is going down
3. Better to be “late to the party” than to be early and run out of money
4. Line item review of the budget every month (legal, accounting, everything)
5. Not just a CEO mindset, but a company mindset
a. Everyone must buy into the process
b. But in a calm way – not run for the hills
6. Create 2 or 3 different burn scenarios – know at any point in time how many months of cash is left.