Present your business the right way

In Today Online, there is an artitle entitled “Present your business in the right way”, written by John Bittleston who runs a business and career email mentoring service. The author tries to give a sense to the entrepreneur how to present the business between the slick and smart style versus the down-to-earth business style. Of course, for doing a presentation on business can only be acquired through experience. In my opinion, the most important thing that any entrepreneur should guard is credibility, hence learning how to guard against giving too little or too much information to the investors is essential. Good day.

In Praise of Bootstrapping

As an entrepreneur, I came to the understanding that fundraising is not the best model for most start-ups. Here is the reason why and I take the opportunity to introduce a strategy that most successful entrepreneurs know and it’s called bootstrapping. Read more

One-stop business info hub for SMEs

From Channel News Asia, 23 Feb 2006, I refer to the article One-stop business info hub for SMEs. The government has created a web portal for small and medium-sized enterprises. The gateway is known as www.business.gov.sg and is known as Enterprise One. It will be good for the readers to take a look into this portal and see whether you can find information on application for government financial schemes and market statistics gathered from 25 agencies.

Innovative but little protected

An article entitled “Innovative but little protected” published in Today discusses about the lack of emphasis in Singapore firms when it comes to safeguarding their intellectual property (IP). It is important to emphasize that IP is an important aspect when it comes to protect the competitive advantage of the company.

From reading the article, only a third of the firms surveyed has applied for patents. Only about 28 per cent of the patents owned by these companies are in effect. These companies did not follow up to fully exploit the IP. TIt is shown that the IP strategies of the technology firms surveyed centered on “protecting their own IP and expanding their IP portfolio instead of maximizing revenue generation from IP” (quoted directly from the article).

For a start, I will suggest that the entrepreneurs to check out the Intellectual Property of Singapore office. They have resources and also clinics to help people who need to seek advice in protecting their intellectual property.

Family Firms and Growth of MNCs

Disclaimer: This article is meant for family firms and businesses in a vibrant economy and none of the discussions here should be inferred for any other purposes, for example politics.
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The Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: Sales

One of the fundamentals of being an entrepreneur is the ability to sell your product. It is not a simple skill to pick up. Particularly for the technopreneurs, selling something can be sometimes a uphill battle. Read more

Ride with the Marketing wave

The new marketing wave of Web 2.0. Read more

Fish bowls, their impending shrinking in size and our ability to influence this new world

As the world gets smaller, privacy ceases to exist and we all live in fish bowls.

I’m scared, the world of the book 1984 might just come true in the near future. Watched, every move tracked, everything you have ever written or said is recorded for storage. The word “privacy” shall be erased from our dictionaries in the future for no such concept will exist then. We can just be like Truman in The Truman Show, only that we can see it coming before it actually happens. Google seems primed to be that director for each of our TV shows. In this article, it is so said that Google has kept tracked of every bit of data it has come across and puts them away in some gigantic storage facility for safekeeping. I mean, isn’t that just a huge repository of all our lives? Sounds a little to me like a mini-God climbing his/her way to becoming an omnipotent God and I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing.

And what’s even worse, pod slurping: enabling sneaky peeps to plug an iPod into any computer machine and in a manner of minutes be able to transport the whole business structure on which the company thrives on away. So your new middle-aged cleaning lady could be a spy from a competitor and the next day, you find yourself out of business. How potentially threatening can this get? To me, this proves the huge ability of technology to disrupt our lives and cause humanity to take leaps forward (or backward, depending on one’s viewpoint) and this is also why, as technopreneurs, we have a great responsibility and thus power in our hands.

I do not believe in creating something that harms the human race or the world in which we reside in. That’s not long-term vision, that’s just being selfish and hopelessly myopic. Like say, something as simple as heroin, it is used to alleviate pain in patients yet it is abused by others. Then we move on to the argument that technology can both benefit as well as corrupt. True. And while some may say that a true mercenary business person might not care about benefiting mankind and would pounce upon a money-spinning idea any time, and that we cannot do much about them, but I am sure that the phrase – every small step counts – rings a bell. I truly believe in it. It will be almost inevitable that your technology might be utilized in a way that is not beneficial to most of mankind but instead insidiously corrupts him, but it is our choice to choose the right path and champion it such that at the end of it all, we win. Instead of conniving individuals who only care about when the next moolah comes in.

Technorati Tags: Business Ethics, Entrepreneurship, Singapore

Recent Thoughts on Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)

The NUS Entrepreneurship Centre has recently released the research findings for Singapore under the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor research program is an annual assessment of the national level of entrepreneurial activitiy. It started with 10 countries in the year 2000 and expanded to 39 countries by 2005. Here is a review of the GEM press conference.
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Singapore Entrepreneurs Blog featured in Singapore Business Visitor Magazine

Official Announcement: We are featured in Singapore Business Visitor Magazine Read more

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