Entrepreneurs.my » Singapore

Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace opens for submissions!

Muhammad Hafiz — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:02:39 +0000

Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace is now officially open for submissions. e27 is reaching out to their various media partners across the region to help get the word out to Asian startups in their communities.

The Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace, formerly known as Echelon Launchpad and Startup Exhibition, has been re-crafted based on the feedback of the Echelon alumni and it will also present more emphasis on all the participating startups at Echelon 2012 and provide them with a more engaging platform to interact with investors, corporate, government agencies and the general public.

The Startup Marketplace is now open for online submissions until 31 March, 2012. To simplify submissions, e27 has adopted Adeo Ressi of Founders Institute’s One-sentence Pitch format. e27’s handpicked panel of judges will score all the valid submissions and shortlist qualified startups to pitch at e27’s four Satellites in Singapore, Jakarta, Manila and Hong Kong.

The Top 50 pitching startups will be selected to exhibit at Echelon 2012 on 11 – 12 June, 2012. Each two-day exhibition slot will cost SGD 400 and will provide the startups with some of the best opportunities to secure regional funding, partnerships and exposure. The best 10 pitches will also be featured at Echelon
2012 with an on-stage pitching opportunity to the main audience.

If you are an Asian startup looking to bring your company to the next level, then Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace is the place to be.
Join the ranks of wellbacked Echelon alumni such as Flutterscape, Insync, Fashionspace and Cardinal Blue to showcase the region’s best.
Application for Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace can be done at http://bit.ly/startups2012/

Election Fever Hits Singapore and Entrepreneurs There Is Doing A Zuckerberg

Daniel CerVentus — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:50:59 +0000

I never really like politics when I was younger. In Malaysia it was never about solving real issues. Well as I am growing up, it seems that politics is the same all around the world until now. Social media have added a whole lot of needed seasoning to the once plain and horrible taste of politics around the world. From the work that the SunLight Foundation does to Govt 2.0 initiative from O Reilly, there seem exist more tools out there to make this whole thing less scary, more participatory and more fun. A couple of young and enterprising entrepreneurs in Singapore is trying to emulate Mark Zuckerberg’s success by building a social app for the up coming Singapore General Election.

Mark’s app that got him into a lot of trouble in Harvard called FaceMash and a lot of notoriety, while Eason and Yugene from StorePair.com is called IlikeYou. These two Malaysian who are currently based in Singapore created an application where you select one of the two politician in Singapore that you like.

If you want to find out more about StorePair.com see the video below. (the site doesn’t seem to be ready)

Another Singapore Company Acquired: CareerBuilding Just Brought JobCentral

Daniel CerVentus — Thu, 05 May 2011 14:40:16 +0000

Singapore’s JobCentral with around 80000 users is one of the largest independent job portal is recently acquired by US-based Career Builder for an undisclosed price. JobCentral which markets itself as different from leaders Jobstreet by distributing it’s ads over 17+ affiliate career portals.
JobCentral is also more college jobs focus, helping fresh grads land their first job.

This seem like the starting of a trend where US/Japan companies looks at small site around the region to purchase. Not unlike Groupon’s global expansion strategy by buying out Malaysia’s clone Groupsmore. However I think this is more towards public facing sites with a whole lot of database and mindshare.

The purchased price was not announced.

Cofounder of Skype, Niklas Zennström In Singapore

Daniel CerVentus — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:46:56 +0000

Want to me one of the most distruptive person on earth, founding companies like Kazaa and Skype while changing the way we communicate. Niklas cofounded Skype which garnered over 309 million registered users within five years, eventually being acquired by eBay Inc for $3.1 billion in 2005. As part IDA’s Infocomm LIVE! series, he will be in Singapore on 29th April to speak to entrepreneurs and business about innovation.

Register here.

via SgEntrepreneurs.

East Ventures Invests in Penn Olson

Daniel CerVentus — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 03:44:28 +0000

It’s official: Penn Olson a site focusing on social media in asia today announced that East Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Singapore, has made an investment in the Asian technology blog. The investment sum has been kept confidential.

As part of East Ventures’s vision to invest in promising start-ups in the Southeast Asia region, Penn Olson fits the bill. With more than 600,000 monthly pageviews, Penn-Olson.com is one of the fastest growing blogs in Asia covering web, mobile, and start-ups in Asia.

“We’re growing quickly but still, I believe we have a lot to learn from successful blogs from the U.S and experience media influencers in Asia,” said Willis Wee, Founder and CEO of Penn Olson.

“Asian technology is growing and developing at an amazing rate, and so is interest from overseas. Somebody has to tell the story and we’re glad to do our part for Asia. We would also hope to be the bridge between the East and the West,” he added.

Founded in July 2009, Penn Olson started out as a hobby. Like any other start-ups, the blog pivoted several times before finding the right direction. Today, it has writers based in China, Indonesia, India, Japan and Singapore to cover tech stories across key regions in Asia. Penn Olson will also be looking to expand to more countries in the future.

“We believe that Penn-Olson.com is an important piece of the whole Internet technology ecosystem in Asia, especially Southeast Asia. Our mission is to help the growth of Internet start-ups in this region, and we believe in order to achieve that, we need to build the ecosystem first.”

About Penn Olson
Founded in July 2009, Penn Olson provides you with Tech and Business content focusing on Asia. The blog plays a part to help shape Asia’s tech and start-up culture. “No promises but we are doing our best.”

About East Ventures
East Ventures is an investment company, specializing in early-stage investments in Internet start-up companies.

Based in Singapore, East Ventures was founded by 4 partners with diverse and complementary backgrounds: Batara Eto, ex-CTO and co-founder of mixi.jp, the largest social networking site in Japan, Taiga Matsuyama, an experienced investor who developed several Japanese Internet companies, some of which were eventually acquired by Yahoo! Japan, Willson Cuaca, founder of Xsago, whose expertise covers mobile application development, and Chandra Tjan, with experience in Finance, Marketing and Management.

Meeting Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin

Daniel CerVentus — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:47:09 +0000

Today, I had the opportunity to interview the other founder of Facebook Eduardo Saverin. If you ask, Who and how is he related to Mark Zuckerberg? I will question “where on earth have you been?” Whether if the story is it true or not, most of us are familiar with the lore of the founding of TheFacebook.com, in the movie The Social Network, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires. I think I should really drop the “The” but I digress. Facebook is one of those dream come true for a start up. Achieving so much in so little time. At the time of writing, Facebook would have collected close to 700 million active users worldwide while eying on China again after being shut down in 2009.

NUS Enterprise invited Mr Saverin to be their keynote speaker for the Innofest The Enterprise Connection as the very first of the series of prominent global entrepreneurs. The whole event was held in honor of NUS 10 years venture in helping young startups to grow and a showcase of some of their more interesting businesses that have sprung out of their program.

Some of the start ups featured were PlayMoolah(finacial education for kids), Movend (in app payment gateway) and my personal favorite, soya based ice cream Soyato.

However, the interview was not meant to be as the media shy young billionaire was overwhelmed by the amount of press showed up and politely excused himself. He said the main reason for him coming over was to check out the startups. Eduardo did eventually gave his first ever public keynote to a crowd of 300 entrepreneurs, investors and educators.

Clearly nervous of his first keynote, the take away points of the speech are that he fell in love with Singapore because of the beautiful country and also the thriving startup eco system. He also stressed a lot that he is interested in investing the social media space and how exciting these new generation of startups can gain amazing momentum. He cites Zynga’s phenomenal growth in CityVille as a good example of simple ideas with high turn around time leveraging on existing infrastructure. He also states, it does not cost much to create sites like Facebook and Cityville

He also said that although sometimes you can be lucky but should embrace failures as it can eventually lead you to good fortune as a long as you keep trying. I believe we will be seeing more of Mr Saverin in the region pretty soon.

Update: Mr Saverin’s talk during Innofest 2011 is up at here.

Echelon Singapore and KL

Daniel CerVentus — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 03:50:32 +0000

Echelon Singapore is in Kuala Lumpur for a satellite event on April 21, 2011 in Zouk which we see 10 Malaysian start ups and not so start ups vie for the role to present in the big event in Singapore.

This year, E27.sg Echelon 2011 hopes to be a two-day, double-track event with an expected attendance of more than 1,000 delegates; a demo pit of more than 40 startups and companies; and workshops and fringe events on June 16 and 17 in Singapore.

If you are interested in some of the Malaysian company, here is a list of them.

Feed George
Feed George aims to aggregate geodata on a single platform providing user with the ease to search data via data categories and feed source through geoRSS. With Feed George, bloggers who wish to add geographical information to their posts are able to do so too.

FLOChip Sdn. Bhd.
FLOChip’s product, 31Storey, seeks to bring in a bigger social element into online shopping by marrying Facebook with eBay. Shoppers can share their fashion tips or lookbooks with their friends while following their favorite participating boutiques. For online shop owners, 31Storey provides a single platform to market, sell, receive payments and monitor sales data easily. Co-founder Ong Teng Siong is a YCombinator alum who sold a company to Loopt.

WorkCrowd by AdExcel Online Networks Sdn. Bhd.
WorkCrowd aims to help build and strengthen bonds among co-workers by being a social platform for the workplace. WorkCrowd seeks to incentivize the initiatives of co-workers in getting to know each other through unlocking badges. The platform can also assist the transition of new workers into the workplace by helping them familiarize themselves with the culture and facilitate knowledge transfer.

FanXT
FanXT is a privately funded website that seeks to be the worldwide leader in fantasy sports. Seeking to expand the fantasy sport offering beyond only that of popular U.S. sports, the website offers a one-stop fantasy platform that works on the web, Facebook, iOS devices, Android, Blackberry, Yahoo! TV and Google TV.

CellKast Games Pte. Ltd.
CellKast Games uses mystery deals that combines proven social game elements and discount offers to drive product discovery through their product Tikam. The concept behind the mystery deals idea is that the company believes that too many options creaties confusion among customer which makes them unhappy. By randomizing what deals customers receive, it lowers expectations while increasing satisfaction. Got a deal that doesn’t suit you? Give it to a friend as a gift!

Posttude
Posttude aims to provide an address for every one by being the new postal code system for the whole world. The service uses the geotude algorithm to assign a 13-number geotude to users which acts like an IP for the location.

MobileApps.com Pte. Ltd.
With the applications industry heating up and drawing a lot of attention from app developers, MobileApps.com seeks to standout from other app stores by allowing developers to retain 95% cut from sales while making it easy for developers to syndicate advertisements of their apps to target end-consumers. By being a global cross-platform app marketplace, MobileApps.com seeks to cut through the hassle and problems of buying apps through other App Stores that may have payment restrictions.

Soft Solvers Solutions Sdn. Bhd.
Aiming to help Asian businesses tackle customer relationship issues, Soft Solvers Solutions’ Second CRM offers on-demand solutions to small companies which covers business operations like sales, marketing, customer support and project management. Small companies can choose to automate their businesses with the simple and cost-effective solutions offered by Second CRM.

Alphapod
Always tweeting about your meals before you devour it? Why not turn this information to help a lost, hungry, soul through Alphapod’s product, WootFood. WootFood aims to be the best way to find good food around you. By displaying highest rated food that is sorted by distance from the user, the service helps foodies discover new and amazing food offerings in the vicinity.
Check out our interview of Wootfood here.

Motif Channel
Motif Channel’s product name explains it all, if you understand Cantonese. Fongfeikei.com gives event tickets a second chance if their buyers are not able to make the event. Ticket-holders can post their unused tickets on the website while potential buyers can place their request for even tickets that they missed out on. A matching algorithm will then notify both parties when a match is found. Not sure where available tickets are? Fret not. Fongfeikei.com’s future offerings includes a geolocation feature that allows users to see the location of available tickets and the event.

You can register for Echelon KL here and do let us know which company in Malaysia interest you.

Singaporean Startup Chalkboard Coming to Malaysia?

Daniel CerVentus — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 03:31:28 +0000

For those who are not familiar with the story of Singaporean startup Chalkboard, the story goes it came from idea to beta product in 21 days and first customer in 30 days. Founders Saumil Nanavati and Bernard Leong both believe in the lean startup model and been agile in developing their product. It has over 11 million impression in Singapore alone. Recently, they it seemed after more than 1 year of development in Singapore, they have started venturing outside of the island nation.

Chalkboard is organizing a public seminar for retail outlets in Malaysia entitled How Chalkboard can benefit you in Retail Marketing.

According to the Facebook events page, it states

Synopsis of the Talk: For the past few hundred years, most shop owners in the food & beverages and retail have used physical chalkboards to drive nearby passing by customers into their businesses. Now the same concept have been extended by the local ad network, Chalkboard into the digital world thru the mobile phone and web integrated with the viral loop of social media (Facebook and Twitter). In this talk, we discuss how Chalkboard can help you to drive more customers into your shop.

Details:
Time: Tuesday, March 29 · 9:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Black Box, Level A2, Block A5, Solaris Dutamas, Publika

You can find out more about the event here.

To find out what is Chalkboard, see the video below.

If you are interested, you can sign up for a free 30 days trial.

Founder Institute Singapore Spring 2011 Applications Are Open

Daniel CerVentus — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:08:16 +0000

The Institute is looking for passionate people to apply, whether you are thinking to launch a new technology company or running a startup that’s less than a couple years old. The Institute supports Founders in a wide range of industries, including digital media, software, biotech, cleantech, ecommerce, advertising, consumer electronics, and the internet. You don’t even need to quit your job to attend the evening sessions. The application takes a few minutes to complete, and applications are processed as they are received.

The Singapore Founder Institute Fall 2010 graduated 14 founders and 13 companies, There are 23 companies with 26 founder graduates from Singapore!

Note Best: With the provision of a subsidy approved by Spring Singapore through Ascendas’ iAxil incubator, Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents will only need to pay subsidized course fees of $600 SGD.

Additionally, SGFI will also be giving out 5 scholarships to 5 Foreigner Applicants who are accepted worth S$500 per accepted founder.

Early Admissions
Apply by the Early Admissions Deadline of March 13th, 2011, and you will be notified of your acceptance into the Founder Institute in late March.

For a limited time only: apply early and the Institute will waive the $50 SGD Application Fee.

There are three additional benefits to applying early. First, you have two chances to be accepted, as your application will be reviewed now, and then once again on the Final Application deadline. Second, if accepted, you have more time to review the course materials and prepare for the program. Third, you are guaranteed a position in the program, which tends to fill up very quickly.

To apply please go http://founderinstitute.com/apply/singapore

The goal for the Founder Institute is to amplify our message during this period of the launch, and we definitely need your help.

2359 Media, The Early Days

Daniel CerVentus — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:37:51 +0000

Yesterday it was announced that 2359 Media got their series A investment from the Singtel Innov8 which is Singtel’s push to invest in hightech startup. It is a great news as we first met these guys at Unconference in Singapore 2009. We have a short video that talk about what 2359 Media was about then.