Two startups praised by Singapore’s Prime Minister

At Singapore’s National Day Rally on August 20, an equivalent of the US’s State of the Union address, BioMers and Joan Bowen Cafe were highlighted by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at different parts of his speech as examples of exemplary initiatives by Singaporeans.

While justifying why foreign students are needed in local institutions despite taking away places for local students, he brought up the example of BioMers, a startup with a mix of Singaporean and foreign co-founders.

Started by students from the National University of Singapore, the company’s flagship product is the SimpliClear braces system, a translucent, almost invisible braces system that is customized for each patient.

“You can look beautiful or handsome even while they are straightening your teeth,” said the premier in his national sales pitch.

When the Prime Minister moved on to talk about how citizens can take initiative to support community causes, he mentioned Joan Bowen Cafe, located in Jalan Wangi. The social enterprise was started by Khong Yoon Kay and Jeanne Seah, parents of special needs daughter Joan Bo Wen, as a means of finding employment for her.

The place is run by a crew of 16 Autistic youths, who learn food preparation through a manual with pictures and detailed instructions. They just launched a second outlet in St Andrew’s Village.

According to Channel NewsAsia, while they’ve not made any profit since they’ve just broken even, the speech seems to be helping somewhat, with the couple receiving employment and joint venture requests following the Rally.

The journey for them has not been easy though, since they had no prior experience in F&B. The owners also feel that the Singapore government can do more to lower the barrier to starting a social enterprise.

“What the government could consider doing, on top of monetary incentives, is to help more parents or other entrepreneurs who want to start up something like this to help special needs children, by providing them tools, setting standards,” said the couple.

Photo: World Economic Forum

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Startup Weekend Taipei Inspires Taiwan’s Software Innovators

This post was written by our guest editor: Tim “Tai-Pan” Brown, an entrepreneur, and the editor in chief of the English language Chinese gadget blog Shanzai.com

This past weekend sees the first rendition of Startup Weekend Taipei. Volker Heistermann of Yushan Ventures is the catalyst for bringing the successful franchise for spurring innovative new business ideas to life to Taiwan.  To get an idea about his motivations and ideas for Startup Weekend be sure to watch the StartUpWeekend.mp4 video.

After spending a weekend with the first participants in Startup Weekend Taipei I have to tell you that whether the next Facebook emerges or not from this event, the event itself is a huge success.

In a country not well known for its software innovation, over 150 participants attended making 30, 60 second pitches for new product ideas. After living in Taiwan for the last 15 years and attending events and meetings where few Taiwanese were willing to engage or participate in meaningful ways it was a revelation to see the unbridled enthusiasm and fearless contributions of these future entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is not new in Taiwan but moving beyond the “family fools and friends” traditional model of Angel investment in Taiwan to a more institutionalized process is relatively new and StartUp Weekend’s sold out success shows a pent up demand.

Ideas pitched for products at the event included portable chat products, recipe making services, location based gaming and time sharing services. Not surprisingly in today’s investment climate most of the ideas revolved around mobile applications.

54 hours later the event concluded with 11 new businesses vying for prizes that included cash, mentoring and virtual office services.  The top ideas as determined by an esteemed panel of judges from the venture capital community in Taiwan, China and Silicon valley included in 3^rd place “Ezcook” an iPad focused, hands free instructions application for making your favorite dishes, and “Vetter” an ideas flow, and management service that brought simplicity and competitive pricing to a 2^nd place finish. The judges favorite for the weekend “Food Jing” is a service that matches your food cravings with the nearest available restaurants.

Congratulation to those winners, their aspiring competitors and the organizers are due and I have no doubt that there are already inspired entrepreneurs hatching new ideas and plans for the next Start Up Taipei event which will take place in January.

 

Related posts:

1. Startup Weekend Taipei – International 54-hour Startup Event comes to Taiwan
2. Startup Weekend Taipei Produces 12 Innovative Internet Services
3. StartUp Weekend Beijing is On This Weekend!

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Singapore’s BAF Spectrum exits from iXiGO

BAF Spectrum, a Singapore-based angel fund that invests in fast-growing and highly scalable Asian companies with a world market potential, has exited from India-based travel search engine iXiGO (see press release).

This took effect after MakeMyTrip, an India-based online travel agency, together with its largest shareholder SAIF Partners, acquired a majority stake in Le Travenues Technology, which owns and operates iXiGO. Together, they now own 76.6% of the company, for a total of US$18.5 million.

IXiGO allows users to pick the best prices for travel deals, hotel bookings, and train or airline tickets from a selection gathered from other travel sites. The company was launched in 2007, and received first-round funding from BAF in 2008 (see story). The website now claims one million visitors a month, and a 2% share of all online transactions in India.

Incidentally, MakeMyTrip had in May 2011 acquired a 79% equity stake in Singapore-based Luxury Tours & Travel for US$3 million. It plans to acquire the remaining shares in cash over a 3-year period, ending in 2014.

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Banding Together Against The Summon Auntie

Sometimes you can’t beat a good name. Take the newly launched iPhone app, Summon Auntie. No, it is not pronounced “sum-muhn” or in IPA lingo “suhm-uhn” – as you foreign tongues might say it – but “sum-mahn” [I would have loved to insert a sample of aforesaid Singlish pronunciation here]. I have seen this app make the rounds amongst my friends, fast.

First, this app aims to help drivers be alerted whenever a parking warden or “parking auntie” is close to the area in which your car is parked. This is so that you can rush back to your car in time if you are over the parking time limit.

However, by no means is this the first parking alert mobile app in Singapore. I covered ParkAlert.me last year.

Second, I believe Summon Auntie’s easy-to-remember name, good UI and Singapore-localized lingo of its app has helped it on its rounds.

Check out some screenshots:

Summon Auntie was released by Singapore-based web and mobile development studio, Replaid, one week ago on Singapore’s National Day as “a gift to all Singaporeans”. One week later, it has seen 1000 cars parked via the app:

The “Alert” feature of Summon Auntie sends out an alert notification to all drivers who have “Parked” their cars within a radius of ~200 metres (650 feet) of your location. What I also like is their Alert History:

Their tagline “Y U NO PANG CHANCE” is a mashup between the “Y U NO” meme and Singlish for “give (a) chance”.

Summon Auntie is not yet available for Android and you can find them on Facebook.

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Startup mentorship with Vinnie Lauria

Vinne Lauria will be joining e27 in our latest mentorship program that is supported by Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA). The program will begin on September 1st and we will be accepting mentorship session applications from today onwards.

Vinnie Lauria co-founded Lefora.com in San Francisco, a forum hosting service for communities on the web. In less than three years, Lefora grew to over 100,000 communities and was acquired by CrowdGather, Inc. Vinnie also started the Silicon Valley NewTech meetup and grew it to over 7,000 members, with hundreds of startups demoing and launching their product at the monthly events. Earlier in his career, Vinnie helped shape how IBM was approaching social software as an emerging and disruptive technology. He recently organized the first SuperHappyDevHouse in Asia and is currently a Mentor at the Founder’s Institute.

For startups who are interested in being mentored by Vinnie, there is an application form here that you can fill up and e27 will get in touch with you to schedule the meet up. All scheduling will be a minimum of two days in advance and any cancellations should be done a day prior to the session.

Vinnie will be spending about two to three weeks in Singapore mentoring relevant startups. He will also be joining us at our relaunch of Founders Drinks on August 31 as an informal panelist and speaker, contributing his experience in social media. For more information regarding the mentorship program, do contact e27′s community manager Joash at joash [at] e27 [dot] sg.

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SmarTots Helps Parents Connect With Their Kids Through Technology

Beijing based SmarTots, is a start-up that aims to help connect parents and their children through learning. They attracted a lot of attention after winning the GMIC Early Stage Start-up Competition back in April.

After noticing that children were spending more time playing with the Apple iPhone and iPad, founders Jesper Lodahl and Victor Wong knew that they were revolutionary learning tools but had no idea what their kids were learning, “we can’t help them if we don’t know what they are learning.” Says Jesper. So they set out to create a mobile SDK, that kids educational app developers could embed into their app to allow parents to receive a weekly analytical report about their kids learning activity.

I sat down with Jesper more recently to find out their story and what they are up to.

Founders background

Danish born, Jesper is a mechanical engineer by education and worked for Nokia for 7 years. In that time he created two patents that have been implemented in more than 1 billion phones worldwide. Jesper was brought over to manage a team of engineers in Beijing and has lived here ever since.

After Nokia, Jesper tried his first foray into start-ups with a social networking site called Club Beautiful in China. Controversially it was a network for only good looking people to be accepted and voted in or out. That venture failed. But that’s when he met his current CTO, Victor Wong, who at the time was consulting on technology for Club Beautiful.

Victor was formerly a founder and CTO of Speak2Me, the largest English language learning social network in China, which was acquired by Lingo Media in 2007. Since Victor has a “rare skill of being a CTO and knowing the education business.”Jesper persuaded him to join him on his next idea, SmarTots.

The birth of SmarTots

Over the Summer of 2010, they raised some angel funds. One of their backers is Casper Johansen of Seravia. Since then, they have developed a prototype which has been in closed beta with a set of key partners.

Just recently they have closed a significant funding round with educational investors from China and America that will be enough to last the next two years. The money will be used expand the team of 12 to 20, by hiring more engineering and product staff in China and marketing people in North America, since that will be their key target market initially. Jesper also has a China strategy in the works.

Helping parents reconnect with their children through technology

Jesper describes SmarTots as the “Openfeint for kids apps.” It helps parents track what their kids are learning on the iPhone and iPad.

“The problem for parents is that they don’t know which apps they should download for their kids, which are age appropriate and they don’t know what their kids are learning on these devices.”

Jesper believes one of the mega-trends happening across the world, is that the more technologically advanced kids get, the less they connect with their parents. So to solve this problem, SmarTots sends the parents a weekly online report card about the kids learning activity and tells them where the learning gaps are. SmarTots will then feed busy parents offline activities and games to help their child improve. For example, Jesper’s daughter likes to spell, so to reinforce her skills; Jesper can play a spelling game in the car with her. “Kids want their parents to be involved when they play and learn; and we are definitely encouraging that.”

Learning activities span across a range of subjects such as language, math, social, art, music, science and body. The focus is on kids aged 2-7.

From listening to parent feedback, SmarTots plans to integrate features like controls over how long a kid can play a game.

Working with developers to make money

SmarTots themselves do not develop any apps, but instead provide an SDK or code for developers to use in their own educational kids apps. “SmarTots provides more functionality than developers can build themselves, such as tracking and reporting function.”

When parents download an app with SmarTots functionality and like it, they can go to the Apple App Store and download more apps from the same developer, effectively helping them up-sell.

Currently SmarTots has an active revenue stream through an affiliate program with Apple, where they get 5% sales commission. “In the future we want to charge developers 15% for incremental sales.”

SmarTots runs on both free and paid apps, however they do not intend to make any money from free apps yet. For the moment free apps are normally a way for parents to try before they buy.

Impressively they have registered half a million downloads since December in closed beta and no marketing. SmarTots plans to open publicly by the end of next week.

The team is also working on a study of educational kids apps to analyze trends over age, gender and location.

 

 

Related posts:

1. TaoMee Vs. Tencent: Battle in Kids Social Networking Market
2. Ohbaba, Helps You Find the Public Toilets Around You
3. It Is Not Only For Kids, Tencent Is To Launch Rebate Service

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Ohbaba, Helps You Find the Public Toilets Around You

If you travel to somewhere which you are not familiar with, usually you can just buy a travel guide which helps you find the suitable restaurant, hotel, tourist points etc. But, usually the travel guide misses one type of information which I mean, when you need it you Really need it, the locations for public toilet.

Ohbaba (app store dowload), is a simple location-based service which can help you locate the public toilets around you. The idea is simple, like other LBS apps, it detects your location and finds the closest public toilets for you. Ohbaba also does UGC (or you can call it Toilet 2.0) as it allows users to submit new entries for toilets. And when you submit a new entry, there is a tick box of Toilet Tissue Available, which you can tick. How sweet it is!!

Ohbaba, is probably the most interesting and simplest Chinese app I’ve ever wrote about so far. I love it for a few reasons:

1. Technology is all about Life. Ohbaba is a public toilet locator, simple as that. But it is really targeted at people’s needs in their real life. The idea might sounds a bit doggy, but it is useful;
2. There are loads of LBS applications helping users to discover this and that. If you talk to the developers of all these apps, probably 95% of them will tell you the big ideas behind the apps. I mean, it’s good to hear. But don’t forget, tiny idea can be big too. Everyone needs toilets, but why only Ohbaba picks it up?

And what’s the next for Ohbaba, I don’t know, but it gonna be joking me if it goes for a toilet-centric social networks.

Related posts:

1. Truth Soft – iPhone App for Travel
2. China is Changing Public Telephone Booths into Wifi Hotspots
3. iPhone App, Campusfork Helps you Find Awesome Food Nearby

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Umiwi Founder Wang Lifen: When CCTV-Style Content Doesn’t Serve Well Online, We Shift Strategies

In May of 2011, Wang Lifen, ex-senior reporter and editor for CCTV, founder of Umiwi.com, declared in an interview that strategies for her online video website had shifted toward somewhere that had less business with video itself.

Can’t CCTV-style content fit in online world?

Before she started building her own Umiwi in September, 2009, Wang Lifen had worked as a senior producer at CCTV, China Central Television — the state-run TV station, for 15 years.

With a professional and experienced team, Umiwi kicked off with talk shows and other original video content that no other Chinese video sites ever offered before. Famous figures, such as Alibaba’s Jack Ma, were invited and proven models, such as Buffett Breakfast, were adopted. There’s no doubt that those shows were just as fine as those you can watch on TV; however, they are not received as well as those on air.

Back in the March of 2010 when Umiwi.com was about to be launched, Wang was reminded by a journalist that Kaifu Lee, former head of Google China, was so experienced as had worked for top internet companies, knew more about internet and had been communicating with Chinese youth. Wang responded decisively, “He cannot beat me. I’m more competitive than Kaifu Lee, I know more about media than he does. I am a quick learner on what masses need and will feed them with Umiwi, which is of new media. That’s my core competency.”

If the core competency works just right, it must refer to Wang’s recognition of consumption behaviors exhibited on Umiwi.com. Wang’s team found that, ironically, pageviews of text and pictures, which are just complementary to videos, surpassed vedio views.“We started with videos as core content. But later on we got to know that traffic driven by text and pictures was very high and on one day surpassed that of video.”Wang recalled.

It seems so far professional TV production skills didn’t give Wang a cutting edge in internet industry.

What’s the point of the service we’d build?

In the latest interview that happened in May, Wang recalled how her team stopped running the website all together and thought about changes. She even said Umiwi.com was not a video site any more.

“Previously I considered Umiwi.com might be a video site, a verticle site or an e-commerce site. After several months, practically we stopped.”

“In last December and this January, we basically stopped adding new content to the website and started contemplating on strategies. What’s the point of the service we’d build? Who are our major audience? Who we’d serve?” After making those questions clear, Wang and her team decided in the end of this April that they’d serve the young on career, entrepreneurship and innovations.”"Innovation is a topic that many others don’t touch while we do.”

“We’ll expand, with various approaches, by meeting needs of young people who are on their way of growing up.”

“Video is just one way of expression and we are not among video sites. That’s the adjustment we made on strategies in recent months.”

Umiwi.com was “relaunched” in the past April.

How to make money in a new way?

TV programs make money from commercials; Other online video sites run commercials and charge viewers.

So far most of Umiwi.com’s revenues come from On The Way, a TV program Wang’s team are making and has been sold to 35 Chinese TV stations; the rest is from online ads. Although, as Wang said, that’s enough to support all staff, it means Umiwi, a new medium, cannot generate revenues in a “new” way.

Wang said they’d been talking with investors but always cautious, “I still have this media dream, especially after we shifted strategies. I’d stick to the dream.” She’s afraid of all the pressures that will come together with investors’ entry.

Wang believed in one to two years Umiwi will become a comparatively big media site.

Related posts:

1. Innovation Works Wang Hua: From Imitation to Innovation
2. Chinese Online Video Sharing, Where Is The Way Out?
3. Youku, Tudou and Sohu Lead China’s Online Video Advertising Market

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Periodontology

Periodontology is the Latin term for the science of the periodontal apparatus. The periodontist is a specialist who is specialized in this subject. If you suffer from gum bleeding, gum recession and/or bone recession you should see a dentist who is specialized in this subject. Usually an exact examination takes place -the so called parodontal diagnosis. According to the degree of severity one ore more initial therapies are the result. After the last initial therapy there should be a waiting time of 8 weeks before beginning to collect data of the gum -a so called reevaluation. Then the diagnosis data and the reevaluation are compared with each other. The periodontist gets a good overview on your gum condition.

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Yikuair: Micro Group Buying with Your Friends

Second Daily Deals Site Operates in China

 

Being the first one of its kind to come into China’s market, Gaopeng, the Chinese subsidiary of Groupon, has been going through tough times with scandal over lottery cheating and a succession of layoffs. But that doesn’t scare or stop people who are outside and want to tap into the promising market to get a chunk.

 

That said, San Jose-based Special Deals is opening its operation in China soon, but with some innovations to differentiate itself from Lashou, Meituan and Nuomi, all are aggressive and fierce local competitors, and to avoid all the pitfalls that Gaopeng have fell into.

 

Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Bruce Chen who used to be one of the founding members of SinaNet (later became Sina through the merger with China’s SRSnet) and later on founded his own startup which was acquired by eBay, Special Deals offers its customers with something different compared to Groupon and Living Social. For regular daily deals services, you need to pay the whole sum to get a meal or movie tickets or something, whereas on specialdeals.com, you only need to pay one tenth of the sum as deposit to make a deal, and then pay the rest when you get to the local merchants. The business model is different from what we commonly see on daily deal sites.

 

 

Focusing on quality, not numbers

 

Its Chinese subsidiary Yikuair takes the same approach with something patently new out there.

Buying deals on Yikuair is different from other Chinese group buying sites, you only need to pay the deposit beforehand, and then when you get to the restaurant or something you can pay for the remaining fee.

 

And its Chinese name Yikuair was a play on words with double meanings. It can be related to “together” which speaks to group buying behaviors, while also means “RMB 1 yuan”, which will be the price(deposit only) for lots of its deals, according to Bruce.

 

Next up, you can share your deals on Sina Weibo and pay your money using Weibo virtual currency. By sharing on Weibo, your friends and followers get to know what you buy recently, don’t underestimate the power of word-of-mouth.

 

The other different thing, is the quality of deals. If you flip through most of the Chinese group buying sites, you may find most of them highlight all types of different numbers related to a deal: original price, discounted price, savings, how many people purchased, remaining time, these numbers stir people to charge their credit cards, and no one cares about the quality of every deals. And that’s one reason why there’re so many complaints over group buying services. According to Tuan800, a daily deals aggregator who also conducts group buying market research reports based on its own dataset, from last December to this May, the aggregator saw an average of 645 complaints monthly with a month-over-month increase of 34.53%. People are not satisfied with what they got.

 

To address that problem, Yikuair will only offer its customers with carefully selected quality deals, mostly international brands.

 

Weibo-based Micro Marketplace For Local Business

 

Except for group buying service, Yikuair is releasing a help-yourself marketplace based on Sina Weibo, the popular SNS in China that let people post, repost messages in no more than 140 characters. As of this April, the microblogging services claims a whopping number of over 140 million users and the number is expected to cross 200 million by year end. That is a huge user base that can be leveraged for decent outcomes.

 

Being the first weibo-based marketplace can give the service some unprecedented edges over its peers including (a) have access to a huge user base (b) no need to cultivate its own pool of users before get started, they’re already there, actively.

 

According to Ady Chen, VP of speicaldeals, In the future, everyone gets to post their own deals on the to-be-launched serivice, they can setup a limited number for how many deals they want to make, add in some descriptions, then wait for customers. The good thing of this is, not every local business is eligible to be featured on Meituan or Lashou, there’re still tons of local businesses or craftsmen need a channel to promote themselves and get exposure to reach its prospective customers. The micro marketplace by Yikuair is there for them. The vision is big considering the amounts of local businesses in China, so does the market size and potential.

 

Related posts:

1. QQ Now Leads Group Buying Market with 10%, Lashou Drops to 10th Position
2. Can We Really Trust Group-Buying Sites in China?
3. China Group-buying Cooled Down In April, Guangzhou Hit Hardest Down 25%

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Get Slosht for cheap drinks

Group-buying deal sites may come by the dozen in the Asian region, but instead of offering the usual spa/manicure/restaurant deals, Malaysia-based startup Slosht is aiming to focus on one aspect: deep discounts for alcoholic beverages.

The site, which was launched in early August, works like any other group-buying deal site: you sign up, bid on a deal, and if enough people buy into it, boom – you’ll be getting your drink on like a rap star with a maxed out credit limit. Right now, there’s only one deal on offer –  a bottle of Glen Grant 16 year old Single Malt Whiskey at half off for the beta launch party on August 18. Another twist are that the deals offered are one-night deals, where buyers have to redeem their deals on a particular date, so you’ll be in the company of other Slosht users on the night.

Top spenders of certain outlets or beverages would also get some extra privileges to the deal such as  free parking, limited edition bottles, and other premiums thrown in. Slosht is run by Lau Chak Onn, who is also the founder of online greeting card service Foldees. We e-mailed Chak to get his thoughts on where we could see Slosht headed to in the near future.

How many users have signed up for Slosht?
We’re just at a few hundred users at the moment, which was a bit higher than our targeted group of friends and family. (Heheh.). The response has been pretty crazy so far since we’ve sold more than 50 bottles of single malt whisky, amounting to some RM15,000 in savings. Of course, the proof is in the punch, which is what happens after we expand beyond our loving and supportive friends and family.

Is Slosht going to expand outside Malaysia? If so, are you going to ramp up the sales staff to canvas separate markets?
Yes and yes! The concept is the only one of its kind in the world, in particular with the one-night concept. Malaysia’s a testing ground for us, and we definitely plan to fly it to many other countries in the near future once we’ve gotten Malaysia up and running.

So what does Slosht get out of the deal here? Does it involve taking a percentage cut, as with other group deal-buying sites?
At the moment, we’re taking a lower commission to reduce prices even more, but will eventually target around the same commission as other group-buying sites. Everything is negotiable at this point because we also want the outlet to put in budgets to make these events good; there’s no point of just taking all the money and leaving the outlet and our users high and dry (literally). For instance, in the pipeline, we’ve got absinthe flea markets and stout pong lined up. Our sell is that people enjoy themselves and associate that with outlets and booze brands.

You also mentioned about plans to make Slosht a more social experience compared to conventional group-buying sites, where it’s just about discounts. Would that mean  more parties and drinking get-togethers?
Everything will be an on-the-ground party and drinking get together. And yes, we want it to become a community. We want you guys to talk to each other, outdrink each other, or pat each other on the back when one of you just got awarded Golden Elf status for consuming 1000 pints of Irish stout. Aside from that, let’s just keep it hush for now.

When will we start seeing some new deals coming along?
We’re limiting the number of deals for now simply because we’re at an experimental stage. Before we go and sell a whole bunch of deals, we want to know what works and what doesn’t. You can ask some outlets, we’ve actually told them to hold off till after Septermber, where we expect four to five deals, all trying different things to see what appeals most to consumers.

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Big Data Goes Mobile – 16 Aug

On Aug 16, Swissnex Singapore will organize an event entitled “Big Data Goes Mobile”. The topic will be: “Making sense of user behavior in a ubiquitous computing environment”.

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About the Speakers

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Olivier Liechti is a professor at University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland (HES-SO), in Yverdon-les-Bains (HEIG-VD). His main research interests are in software engineering and ubiquitous computing. Olivier is also CTO at Lotaris, where is leads the R&D activities of the company. Before joining the HEIG-VD, Olivier worked 6 years for Sun Microsystems as a senior software architect. Olivier has a MSc in Computer Science from University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and a PhD in Computer Engineering from Hiroshima University (Japan).

 

Ben Leong is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, School of Computing. He received his S.B., M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997, 1997 and 2006 respectively. His research interests are in the areas of Computer Networking and Distributed Systems.

 

Robert Tibbs is the Founder, Group President and CEO of Swiss-based Lotaris SA. For the past 25 years, Robert has been an entrepreneur, investor, and manager of technology businesses. Prior to Lotaris, Robert was MD of African Operations for Actel (a rural telecoms network sold to a major US cable company), Founder and CEO of Accelon (a satellite based broadband company sold to a FTSE 100 UK technology company), and Founder and Chairman of Africa Venture Partners (a telecom advisory and investment firm based in Johannesburg). He is a Swiss citizen, resident in Singapore and Japan, and a Summa Cum Laude graduate in Behavioural Science from the Technology Institute at the State University of New York.

 

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Event Details

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When: Tue, Aug 16
Time: Registration starts at 4.45pm
Where: National University of Singapore, School of Computing Video Conferencing Room. Building COM1, #02-13
Register here.

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TechDuology videocast speaks nerdy to you

If you like your Diggnation-style two-guys-on-a-couch-talking-nerdy podcasts, there’s a new videocast on the Malaysian scene that you might want to check out.

Now in its second episode, TechDuology is hosted by radio DJ Ben Jern and tech blogger Jason Goh,  who discuss consumer-tech stories with a local spin (don’t expect heavy discussions or entrepreneur goss ala TechCrunch here).  The stories in the second episode, for example, include mentions of Cut The Rope Experiment, mobile phone reviews, the Nokia N9 launch in Kuala Lumpur, and an Angry Birds Bra.

A new episode is out every Friday on YouTube, so if you’ve got some time to burn and have been meaning to check out what’s going on in the Malaysian consumer tech scene, press play.

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Coffee or Tea? Or a Mix of Both? A Better Startup Environment from the Ground Up.

If you are from EU, probably you know a meetup called OpenCoffee. I’ve been to OpenCoffee London & Leeds when I was in UK. It’s a very casual meetup, people just escape from office for ~2 hours, find a nice cafe, meet and chat. I like it very much, at that time I thought we should have one in China, but instead of calling it OpenCoffee, we should say OpenTea because I though Coffee is not popular, but Tea is. Till now, no one ever brought OpenCoffee to China, but I am also partially wrong, more and more Chinese start loving coffee, at least loving to meet with others at the cafe. And we even think Cafe is a Sign for Chinese Internet Prosperity.

I think it is a really good time to do a startup in China right now, not just because the money is there but also the ecosystem for startups is getting improved. As a sign of it, besides quite a few startup competitions organized by different local media, such as DEMO China, more and more western style events such as Barcamp, Startup Weekend, iWeekend, Mobile Monday etc are now in China. Of course, we definitely need more.

However, as a helper of all those events, I keep thinking of one thing, how can these western formats generate more impact on local communities? I mean I love the unconference, I like the idea of people getting together to fully focus on one project during one weekend, but when you see most audience are expats or English-speaking; the quality of the startups showing up needs improved because many good local startups or founders are shy (well, in general Chinese is shy…) and don’t like to expose their ideas at early stage; some of the mentors or judges come nowhere but in fact have limited knowledge about the trend; some organizers are full of passion but lacking of experience, that coffee looks good but is not as tasty as you expected.

And for the tea, the situation might go either way. It’s super nice when you have local gov or software park’s support which can bring you free venue and promise some other resource. But if they don’t really get the spirit of doing startups and don’t understand what startups really need, things may get worse and even out of your control.

It’s hard job to mix the local communities with English-speaking communities in China, as language barrier is really an issue. You can give a presentation in English, but communication and discussion afterwards which is more important turns out hard for both sides. DEMO China is good, but it is a bit old school format and not for early stage startups. We need bring out more local brilliant founders to get them to speak at the events and in the meanwhile, we need those high-profile people, either investors or experts to come down to the grassroot and share their honest thoughts with startups.

Coffee or Tea, or a mix of both, taste is different, what we are expecting is simply the same: a better startup environment from the ground up.

[image via lynnrockets]

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3. Café, A Sign for Chinese Internet Prosperity

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British Government Considering Social Media Ban. Was China Right?

Recently news from the United Kingdom has focused on the violent rioting on the streets, with hooligans smashing and looting shops and clashing with police. When I saw the images, I was shocked by how such a modern city spiraled out of control. The violence erupted after London’s Tottenham district police shot and killed a man without a reasonable explanation. Youth’s then vented their pent up frustration over society, such as finding it difficult to get into university or find a job. This has led Prime Minister, David Cameron to call into question the role of social media such as Facebook and Twitter in assisting such violent and organized outbreaks.

CNN news reported that,  President David Cameron said ”Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media…Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.” Now government officials are working with authorities to investigate whether it would be better to stop people communicating via social media when they “know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Of course, social media supporters have lashed out at the idea of blocking social media to any degree, as it denies the basic human right of freedom of speech and degrades democracy. Others have argued that Twitter and Facebook have been used for good to organize clean up efforts and call for peace.

For a long time, internet censorship has been the core of heated debates in China. It’s a complicated and tricky issue. Most Westerners who come to China, and are used to total access to social media back home, are shocked and confused by why the Chinese government blocks social media. For people, it impacts daily communication. For companies, it impacts their very existence. We all know the tenuous relationship between Google and the Chinese government.

But when even the most democratic government in the world, UK, is considering banning or imposing controls on social media, it starts to give interesting perspective on whether the Chinese government as a communist government had reasonable grounds to block foreign social networks in China. There are a number of suspected reasons for this, ranging from domestic economic protection to social security protection.

But if you live in China, you would know that social media, at least Chinese owned and operated social networks like RenRen or Weibo are not blocked at all. In fact, the exponential growth of mobile and internet users has triggered the boom in social networking. Instead, content is tightly controlled by teams who deem things appropriate or not.

I think social media networks should take responsibility for immediately removing any content that is clearly used to organize violent group activities before things spin out of control. I think it’s an invasion of privacy to pre-empt and monitor everything that is being written but at the least, social media companies can delete violent organization as soon as it is created. How they do this, is a different issue.  Of course this is over-simplifying the situation and solution but there has to be balance between allowing people to communicate openly without compromising the general safety of the community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1. The Chinese Social Media Landscape
2. The Segmented Chinese Online Social Media
3. The Loyalty, The Missing Treasure in Chinese Social Media

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