The State government recently announced that as part of its plans to accelerate the transformation of Selangor into a knowledge-economy a number of technopreneur campuses will be set up throughout the state with i-City being the first and flagship campus. One of the programme under this technopreneur campus initiative is a State-sponsored Incubator.

i-City, PKNS and Plug and PlayTech Centre Silicon Valley would be forming a strategic alliance to set up the i-City Plug and PlayTech Centre Incubator (i-City PnP Incubator).

Plug and PlayTech Centre Silicon Valley will also consider investing in the technopreneur companies under this incubator programme as well as be a bridge for them to the US market and US venture capital funds. There are also opportunities for Malaysians to form joint ventures with the tech companies in the Plug and PlayTech Centre Silicon Valley campus to localize the products and services for the regional market.

In the initial phase, the Selangor state through its agencies would be investing RM 50.0 million in a number of technopreneur companies under this i-City PnP Incubator programme.

i-City PnP Incubator would also be working with MDeC and a number of Malaysian technopreneur associations to ensure that the incubation programme meets the local technopreneur needs.

i-City PnP Incubator would initially occupy a 2,000 sq ft floor space in the i-City Cybercentre Suite 1 complex and would be relocated to a dedicated building when this is completed in 2 years time. I-City PnP Incubator has also established a business services group to provide the necessary administrative, secretarial and legal services to the technopreneur companies. A mentor panel comprising experienced business leaders to coach and guide these technopreneurs are also in place.

In the first half of 2010, 10 to 15 companies will be identified to be nurtured and grow. The initial selection focuses on companies in the development of solutions for digital cities, mobile contents or products and services for the property and construction related sectors.

Moving into the second half of 2010, there will be an opportunity to incubate 20 to 30 potential individuals desiring to be technopreneurs. i-City PnP Incubator role for this phase would be to link these individuals with the relevant resources to enable them to move beyond the concept stage to developing the prototypes.

It is envisaged that it would take about 2 to 3 years for each technopreneur company to move from the initial concept stage to the growth stage and hence by the end of the next year, i-City PnP Incubator would be hosting about 50 incubatees every year.

In announcing this i-City PnP Incubator programme on 25th Feb 2010, the Menteri Besar of Selangor said the State has conferred the International Park status on i-City so that it can have entertainment and cosmopolitan lifestyle outlets as well as to operate 24 hours. At the same time, the State will also accelerate the construction of the direct access from the Federal Highway into the site. Both of these are part of the various plans to ensure the success of i-City PnP Incubator programme.

Meantime, I-Berhad, the developer of i-City, wishes to inform that its sector classification on the Main Market of Bursa Malaysia Securities Berhad has been re-classified to “Properties” sector from “Consumer Products” sector previously effective 1 March 2010 to reflect the change in its core business to property development and management.

The Stock Number and Stock Short Name of I-Berhad’s shares would remain unchanged.

It seems like there will be less money for technology based entrepreneurs (technopreneurs) in 2010 in form of government grants. According to the article below by the Star dated 4th Feb 2010, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation or MOSTI has lost RM1 Billion of its budget due to a cut.

As we know, grants such as the e-content grant and the MSC Preseed fund have recently run out(the last batch 21 closed on 3rd Dec 2009).

Looking at 2010 will be the in-between years of most grants technology related or otherwise because of the 10th Malaysian plan, it is highly unlikely for any agencies or ministries to give up more fund.

As for other grants in Malaysia, we think most ministry are in a look and see mode for the 10th Malaysia plan (RMK10) which will be only pen down in June but implemented in 2011. We figure that the ministries have already draft their proposal for the (RMK10), there are no indication yet that RMK 10 will benefit the technology entrepreneurs in Malaysia.

Taken from the Star 4th Feb 2010

KUALA LUMPUR: Technopreneurs hoping for funding from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Mosti) are in for a tougher time this year.

And the predicament has upset several applicants who are already not happy over the red-tape encountered when applying for such grants.

The ministry said its 2010 budget for such grants has been cut by RM1bil, leaving RM2.7bil in its coffers to be handed out to deserving applicants.

“Funds are quite limited for this year,” said Suhaimi Hamzah, deputy undersecretary for the commercialisation section at Mosti. “Sole proprietorships and certain partnerships and companies have about 10 months left to apply.”

“Our e-content grant funds have already run out,” he said.

Suhaimi was speaking at the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry Malaysia seminar on government grants and financial assistance for Malaysian companies, held in the capital on Tuesday.

Mosti has several funding programmes for various fields of research, development and commercialisation, including biotechnology, industrial, information and communications technology (ICT), sea to space technology, and science technology.

Another source of funding for technopreneurs is the Multimedia Development Corp (MDeC), which oversees the nation’s ICT initiatives.

The 10th Malaysia Plan, to be announced in June and which will only kick in next year, may or may not see an increase in the amount of future government grants.

With Pamela Fox (@pamelafox) from Google Australia as our special guest this week, the TWIA crew tried to make sense out of the JooJoo’s new partnership with CSL Malaysia. We also reviewed the future of Naver, the top search engine in South Korea, the Malaysia government’s declaration of 95% adoption in OSS and most exciting of all, the impact of the court ruling on iiNet’s victory over the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). Not to mention, we weaved Google Wave, FilmCamp SG, the #dIE6 movement and adoption of open source in governments into an exciting week of This Week in Asia. Continue Reading

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

No this is not a Malaysia clone of the Ipad or its clone. This is a rather interesting new twist to the JooJoo/Crunchpad incident.

In case you missed out, Fusion Garage(FG), a Singaporean company was supposed to partner with Techcrunch to launch their version of the Ipad called the Crunchpad. A few days before the launch, Michael Arrington announced the death of the Crunchpad. What happened after that was FG decided to launch the product by themselves and renaming it the Joojoo.

With an impending case with Techcrunch, FG was taking pre-order and announced they received a new round of investment and a partnership with a South East Asia mobile player. This “major mobile player” is no other than Malaysia’s own CSL group. According to their site, “CSL is a leading and most established mobile phone service company in Malaysia”. CSL group is a retailer, service provider and currently manufacturing mobile devices and netbooks.
Their carry their own range such as the Blueberry and the Nseries netbooks.

With this partnership, CSL will be their manufacturing partner for the Joojoo and we will expect to see the device in the market by end of Feb.

When asked by SgEntrepreneurs on the Ipad, Chandrasekar said with the bigger screen and faster loading time, the Joojoo will be formidable and he thanked for opening up the market as pre-order of the Joojoo pad has increased since the announcement of the Ipad.

We have yet to get any comment from CSL when this article was published.

To find out on some of our thoughts on the Crunchpad Joojoo incident, listen to ThisWeekinAsia Episode 5

Entrepreneurs.my is involved in a new podcast called This Week in Asia or #TWIA
TWIA is a technology new podcast that covers top weekly technology and startup news around the continent of Asia.

So far guest involved in the show including

Mark Surman, executive director of Mozilla.org (listen here)
Joi Ito of Neoteny Labs, Digital Garage and early investor of Twitter Japan. (listen here)
and many more.

Starting now, we are going to syndicate TWIA over at Entrepreneurs.my and do remember to spread the world. Check it out at www.ThisWeekInAsia.net
or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Listen to the very first episode of TWIA

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Our very own CerVentus was on The Digital Edge 15 recently with John Lim, Ben Isreal and David Lian and we talked about the fall of MySpace, MOL Access Portal Berhad and Friendster, the Digg’s vote-for-ads experiment, dead Danger Sidekick, behavioral advertising,and social networking bans in work.

For more info download it at The Edge or sign up it at Itunes.