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21/02/08 Start-Up@Singapore: Interactive Digital Media
SINGAPORE - Last night I twittered a little from a Start-Up@Singapore event on interactive digital media. I love meeting fresh start-up companies, and discussing their technologies. It always opens my eyes to new thinking.
Singapore is highly efficient, you can tell there’s a plan, and it’s been rehearsed. Everyone has been told where to be, what to say and there’s no shortage of resources. Its corporate, its formal and its intimidating. Until the entrepreneurs start speaking… then you realise its all shine.
Shine we don’t have in Europe where start-up/entrepreneurial meet-ups are rough on the edges, winging it and commonly associated with an open bar. Last night we got Microsoft sponsored rice, noodles, éclairs and cordial juice and it is obvious that eating is the shared social function replacing our drinking.
It’s an interesting observation that after the cultural formalities have been completed here, and you’ve exchanged business cards with both hands, the discussion dissolves to the same topics as in Dublin or London. Entrepreneurs priorities, social interaction and interests are identical.
I met some fantastic people last night - Singapore is brimming with enthusiasm with many comparisons to Ireland - but I’d say in reverse. They’ve had the big western corporates here for a long time and now are trying to motivate a start-up culture to counter their top grads going to work for a foreign company (generally financial institutions) in Singapore and ultimately leaving the shores.
Here’s a selection of people I spoke with…
Dr. Lai Kok Fung, CEO and Co-Founder of BuzzCity - BuzzCity’s mygamma.com won best mobile social network at the World Mobile Congress last week. They have 2.4m members who access by mobile phone primarily in India, South Africa, Indonesia. Dr. Lai had some great stats about mobile usage in emerging markets and I’m going to write a full post on my thoughts there - but it certainly enthused me.
Alvin Lai, QIK.com - Alvin has just moved from the QIK offices in San Francisco to Singapore where he’ll lead the Asia Pacific QIK user community. Alvin was wowed by my stories about the uptake in the large Irish use of QIK. Alvin actually broadcast the panel session live on QIK.
Daniel Ingitaraj, Director of Platform Evangelism, Microsoft - Daniel gave us a running demo of Photosynth. Daniel spoke about reality very well and was certainly in-touch with potential directional pitfalls for start-ups.
Aileen Sim, Co-Founder & COO of First Meta - Aileen produced a sample Linden Dollar Credit Card for me from her purse. The first virtual currency credit card from First Meta Bank. You can buy unlimited items in Second Life on credit and pay back in L$ later. Instead of paying L$ “cash” upfront you right-click on the item you want and select ‘MetaCard’. You can pay-off your account from any First-Meta ATM they’ve installed in-world. For more on Second Life currency see our Reuters L$/US$ exchange rate charts ;-)
Some points I gleamed…
Singapore is good at hiding behind B2B solutions. B2C experiences are low as companies have been brought up to sell their technology to large Western companies.
In S.E. Asia, EPL (European Premier League) Soccer coverage is one of the few remaining media-types people will actually pay for, everything else from movies, porn, tv, magazines is ad supported and free to the viewer. This is because there is only one source for live soccer and there is no option. If there was, viewers would go for ad supported.
I get the feeling Singapore is a bit insular. The rest of the world is either very far away, dirty or dangerous. But Singapore is too small to focus on itself and a point was made that this needs to be broken and Singapore entrepreneurs need to build for global release, not local.
There is an issue where big Western banks with Asian HQ’s in Singapore are picking off the very top graduates from universities with big salary offers. This is leaving Start-ups with little hope of employing great talent on local rates.
People need to be engineering for the passion of engineering, not influenced by salary levels. Be a Nerd, it’s ok!
I’ll be at the next event, S@S Web2.0 Emerging Industry. If you’re in Singapore - say hi to me.
-Robin.
(Image Credit: Myself at the Chingay ‘Parade of Dreams’ City Jam 2008 on Saturday. Unfortunately it was too ‘controlled’ to be fun and we left! By author.)
Tags: asia, interactive digital media, s@s, singapore, startup, startup@singapore
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25/04/08 Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ] » Blog Archive » Trends: Mobile Internet Landscape
[...] Sources: I took many of these figures, trends, quotes and predictions from talking to people at the S@S event at Microsoft Singapore. [...]
