S@S Enterprise Series

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/

Samsung Developer Night

In this era of burgeoning mobile platforms, most handset-makers are looking at developing their own. Samsung is no exception. They released their open platform called Bada which enables rich user experience in applications on Samsung mobile phones. If you are curious to find out how they differ from other mobile platforms, then you should attend Samsung Developer Night.

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.

Neoteny unconference – How Epic Fail and Agile Development Can Change the World

If you asked me to pick the buzzword spoken most during this event, it would definitely have to be FAIL! However, the unconference was anything but that! This weekend, instead of lazing around and sleeping till afternoon, I decided to hurl myself and that too at 8 am to attend the first ever Neoteny event and boy, am glad I did since I had an absolutely awesome time there, to say the least. Neoteny Labs in collaboration with the powerhouse Ruby on Rails development house – Pivotal Labs is establishing center of best practices here in Singapore, where they will be providing training for startup entrepreneurs and developers on development techniques and helping them to create products.

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/

What Do Martell, INSEAD and Standard Chartered Have to do With Startups?

This is pretty interesting. Imagine, if you had 760 sq ft of shop space at Clarke Quay, what would you do with it? That’s exactly what Martell, along with their partners INSEAD and Standard Chartered wish to hear from you. Welcome to the Ultimate Startup Space!

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!

Google to Cover Street View API at 3rd GTUG Meetup

It’s time for the 3rd, and probably the last Singapore Google Technology User Group (SG-GTUG) meet up of 2009. The event will be taking place this Saturday, Dec 5th 2009 and the theme of the meet up is “Google Geo technologies“. This is perfect considering Google just launched the street view feature for Singapore. The talks will primarily cover Google Maps and Earth and particularly cover the street view API which was released this morning in Singapore.

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!