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(1) Chololi lets anyone send a pre-written notification to the offending hairy culprit anonymously via their email. “For all you people who are thoughtful and in a difficult position, we give you Chololi the deputy service for notification about nostril hairs” explains the site. (2) Following a disappointing financial report, Japanese video game maker Cave announced it will focus more on social... [Read More]

For a wired generation used to playing games on the computer or smartphone, the Real Escape Game offers an alternative, novel way to have fun. We were told that over 100,000 participants have played the game in China and Japan, where it was conceptualized. Which explains its longish full title: “The Real Escape Game in Singapore Vol 1: Escape from the Mysterious Cathedral”. The event... [Read More]

(1) Kantar Media acquires leading Chinese social business intelligence agency CIC. (2) Yunyun’s social search merges websites, question-and-answer (Q&A), and Weibo (microblog) results. It is a Chinese social search startup by a team of ex-Googlers. (3) Sina has been failing to find a sustainable business model (enterprise Weibo, gaming, etc.), none of which have been proven to work. The company... [Read More]

In the restaurant-eat-restaurant world of the F&B industry, few local brands have stood out as clearly as Crystal Jade, one of the market leaders in Singapore. Celebrating its 20th anniversary last year with a refreshing of its identity that involves extensive refurbishments at its restaurants, Crystal Jade enjoyed a turnover of S$240M (US$189M) in 2010. Over the last three years, it has expanded... [Read More]

For Singaporean Lawrence Koh (photo, right), no dream is so big that it can’t be achieved. Consider this: As the founder and managing director of iFly Singapore, he started the largest indoor skydiving facility in the world — at five meters wide and five storeys in height. It’s also the first in Singapore. His business the fulfillment of his dream to gift the experience of flight... [Read More]

For those of you who have been following the tech startup scene closely, you would have heard of Arnon Kohavi, an Israeli investor who tried but failed to set up a venture capital firm in Chile. As a result, he shifted his new fund, Yarden VC, to Singapore. Writing to US tech blog TheNextWeb, he talked about the reasons why he left the Latin American country after six months, and highlighted the many... [Read More]

Recently, a lunch treat with a couple of friends brought up an interesting discussion on how much we should pay interns in a start-up. Given the dearth of talent in Singapore as many claimed, one solution is to look for inexperienced and passionate people, and they usually come from the tertiary institutions (universities and polytechnics). The aim of this article is to establish some principles in... [Read More]

What do Amazon, IBM, Kickstarter and Twitter have in common, other than being great technology companies? They all use Ruby on Rails. With so many things going for it, it’s an attractive framework that allows you to deploy web apps quickly and effectively. That’s enough to make you want to pick up Ruby on Rails! So, I’ve put together ten good sites where you can pick up the framework as... [Read More]

If you can't smile after signing a deal, chances are that you've been screwed over. Photo: Candie_N Here’s a situation which some entrepreneurs would go through. They decide to take in an investor or join an incubator program. In front of them, an investor asks for “x” % of equity. The entrepreneurs then speak to different people in the community to get some advice. The opinions... [Read More]