Events range from simple get-togethers to full-blown conferences. Get to meet fellow developers, entrepreneurs, startup CEOs & founders, and meet & learn from CEOs of established companies who have seen it all.

Our aim here at SGE is to make it easy for you to pick & choose from the event buffet. Enjoy.

Here are the events for this week. Events are mostly in Singapore (generally 30 minutes drive from anywhere), but we also include key events from around Southeast Asia and beyond.

Sunday 12th February:

(1) SG Geek Girls Valentine’s Day Founders’ Mixer

Monday 8th February:

(1) IDA Global Market Forum: Understanding International ICT Trends and Opportunities

Monday to Friday 13th-17th February:

(1) Singapore Polytechnic Media and Communications Conference 2012
(2) Social Media Week 2012

Tuesday to Sunday 14th-19th February:

(1) ASEANpreneurs Youth Leader Exchange

Wednesday 15th February:

(1) Girls in Tech Singapore’s “Entrepreneur Superstars” panel & launch party
(2) Web Wednesday with Anders “Jesus” Färdigh

Thursday 16th February:

(1) Soft Launch of The Young Entrepreneurs Program & Panel Discussion

Image courtesy of joyosity.

Events range from simple get-togethers to full-blown conferences. Get to meet fellow developers, entrepreneurs, startup CEOs & founders, and meet & learn from CEOs of established companies who have seen it all.

Our aim here at SGE is to make it easy for you to pick & choose from the event buffet. Enjoy.

Here are the events for this week. Events are mostly in Singapore (generally 30 minutes drive from anywhere), but we also include key events from around Southeast Asia and beyond.

Saturday 4th February:

(1) Startup Talks with Benjamin Joffe

Monday 6th February:

(1) Startup Talks with Rowan Simpson

Wednesday to Thursday 8th-9th February:

(1) Free workshop on Windows Phone ‘Mango’ development

Thursday 9th February:

(1) ACE BlueSky Exchange: How IT can improve your bottom line
(2) Reading Room Breakfast Briefing

Image courtesy of joyosity.

Events range from simple get-togethers to full-blown conferences. Get to meet fellow developers, entrepreneurs, startup CEOs & founders, and meet & learn from CEOs of established companies who have seen it all.

Our aim here at SGE is to make it easy for you to pick & choose from the event buffet. Enjoy.

Here are the events for this week. Events are mostly in Singapore (generally 30 minutes drive from anywhere), but we also include key events from around Southeast Asia and beyond.

Saturday 28th January
(1) Toad Talks with Ari Klinger

Saturday to Sunday 28th-29th January
(1) ideas.inc Workshops

Monday to Thursday 30th January-2nd February:

(1) Mobile Money APAC 2012

Tuesday 31st January:

(1) Toad Talks with Melisa Clarke-Reynolds

Wednesday 1st February:

(1) Toad Talks with Scott Rafer

Thursday 2nd February:

(1) 85Broads Informal Chinese New Year Dinner
(2) TiE Singapore Luncheon Event with Chairman of Headstrong Corporation

Thursday to Friday 2nd-3rd February:

(1) Startup Asia Singapore

Friday 3rd February:

(1) Startup Talks with Benjamin Joffe
(2) The Garag3 Innovation Friday: Chinese New Year 2012 Gathering

Saturday 4th February:

(1) Startup Talks with Benjamin Joffe

Image courtesy of joyosity.

If you are actively looking for the right date or just wanted to find the right type of people to hang out with, you can consider downloading the Little Black Book app on Facebook.

This new app enables you to instantly connect and access your friends’ networks, putting to rest the trouble of finding the right individuals to connect with. Bachelors and bachelorettes can even use it to actively looking for “that someone special” through Facebook.

Little Black Book spots filtering features that categorise your contacts and your friends’ networks by gender, status, hometown, school and employer, that are both easy to use and instant. You could also privately invite friends if you didn’t want to be found out and teased by friends who love spreading rumours!

The idea for this app came from Vinod Nair, CEO of Catapult Ventures.

He says: ”When I was single, I wanted to expand my social circle and get to know more people (specifically girls). It was such a pain to search through my friend’s friend list because there was no easy way to filter the guys from the girls, the single from the married, and so on. I often browsed around a little, and then gave up because it was just too slow!”

Call it cheating as you may, but this handy app might just find your perfect match and lead the way to a blissful engagement and marriage happily ever after…

According to Vinod, searching and filtering is the primary feature of the app that “makes it so much easier to find single people of the opposite gender.”

And perhaps a blissful engagement and marriage, happily ever after.

“You can also ‘Hit On’ people without any fear of rejection! Unlike a Facebook direct message, when you use the app to hit on someone, they do not get notified unless they hit on you too and there’s a match!”

So you can pour your heart out to your crush, and she won’t know unless she decides to let you know that she’s has a crush on you all this while. Vinod adds: ”You can even recommend someone to a friend of yours, play matchmaker or just ‘favourite’ them for future reference.”

”The app is unlike other dating apps like Zoosk or Speeddate because the aim is not to connect you with random people. It focuses on real connections and your extended network which is usually how people meet anyway!”

For newly-single celebrities like Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, this app could certainly come in handy.

About the author

Julian Abraham Chua is a freelance writer whose works were featured in Strait Times’s Youthink section previously and regularly writes for various magazines including NTUC Lifestyle, Spin Asia, Timeout Singapore and Campus Magazine.  Graduating from Nanyang Polytechnic not too long ago and majoring in business management, he along with his friends, started a company YTY Groupand is now an established entreprenuer with his own distribution business in gifts and stationery. His passion for the pen was ignited when he started writing for his polytchinic’s online news portal and interviewed various rising sports stars including footballer Hariss Harun and national gymnast Lim Heem Wei.

More than 30 participants joined in for the Singapore Geek Girls' first meet-up

On 7th January, I had a wonderful opportunity to take part in the first Singapore Geek Girls meetup organized by Joyce Huang and Mingfei Yan. Being a girl myself I am very interested in what it means to be a geek girl in Singapore and I was extremely lucky to arrive in Singapore right on time for it.

I believe it was two months ago that the idea of the group was born and it apparently addresses a hot spot here in Singapore, as more than 30 people gathered in the cozy Group Therapy Coffee on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t a girls-only event and we had six guys who seemed to feel rather comfortable amongst dozens of cheerful and excited girls.

As Joyce in her opening speech explained – the main reason to initiate this coming together was from her personal experience of being one of the 5 girls versus 30 guys at her workplace. “Enough with the dirty jokes!”, she said, and a slew of ‘we-know-what-you-mean’ laughter came from the rest of the ladies.

With some support from guys in the community, girls can also change the world via technology and design. Joyce drafted a proposal where SG Geek Girls will organize meet-ups (once every two months), talks, workshops, bootcamps and other events. She also stressed that what SG Geek Girls becomes would depend on the interests and input from the community.

The girls took turns to listen and share about their interests and motivations

We did a wonderful introduction round where each person explained their interests and motivations for attending and was supported by applause and very often also cheers. Although the event brought together diverse groups of people, I would say that majority of the girls were recent or soon-to-be graduates of the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University and were mainly interested in meeting like-minded girls who have an interest in technology.

Many expressed their desire to learn more about programming and entrepreneurship

While some girls had a technical background, many girls expressed their interest in learning programming. Working in close contact with geeky guys and not understanding the language they speak in (programming languages after all are languages, right?) seems to be an issue of control {when he says this can not be done, is it true?} and also empowerment {to make the website the way I feel it should be, I need to know how to make it}. A few of the girls wanted to start or has already started their own companies.

With just the ladies

I had multiple lovely conversations with girls that afternoon and a point that I kept thinking long after the meeting was regarding the acquisition of knowledge. Very often we feel like other people ‘just somehow know it all’– as if guys magically internalized up-to date knowledge about gadgets and sports tournaments.

I bet that from the guys’ perspective it might seem as well that girls are similarly born with  internal knowledge about cosmetics and celebrity weddings. None of which is true. It’s all just a matter of practices that we observe and repeat, and the conversations that we have with people around us on an every day basis.

Having the experience of being a minority back at Media Tech (we were a group of 20 guys and 4 girls), I can relate to many sentiments shared in the meetup. I truly believe that it is important to create a space where girls can come together, discuss technology in a manner that reflects how they feel about it — including dreams as well as insecurities — and enrich themselves with the support they get from others.

Posters and stickers from the Singapore Geek Girls first meet-up

Thumbs up to Joyce and Mingfei for initiating this and I wish for the SG Geek Girls’ community to grow stronger and prosper. I was very happy to see that a lot of inspiration for this event stemmed from Hackerspace SG. While sustaining a strong community is not an easy task, the atmosphere was full of excitement and that is a good starting point.

PS. Guys are always warmly welcomed to join as long as they bring girls along.

Check out the Singapore Geek Girls Facebook Page for more updates of upcoming events.

This is a edited version of the original blogpost by Zane Kripe, a PhD student at the Leiden University Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. Zane is currently researching geek culture in South East Asia (Singapore, Indonesia) and explores what it means to be a geek in the region.

Events range from simple get-togethers to full-blown conferences. Get to meet fellow developers, entrepreneurs, startup CEOs & founders, and meet & learn from CEOs of established companies who have seen it all.

Our aim here at SGE is to make it easy for you to pick & choose from the event buffet. Enjoy.

Here are the events for this week. Events are mostly in Singapore (generally 30 minutes drive from anywhere), but we also include key events from around Southeast Asia and beyond.

Friday to Sunday 13th-15th January
(1) iConnect 2012

Saturday to Sunday 14th-15th January
(1) The 24hr Business Plan Challenge

Tuesday 17th January:

(1) DEMO Asia Auditions for Korean and Japanese companies via Skype

Tuesday to Wednesday 17th-18th January:

(1) [Jakarta, Indonesia] BOOST Conference: From Valley to Indonesia

Thursday 19th January
(1) DEMO Asia Overseas Audition
(2) BANSEA Network@Lunch
(3) Big Data SG Meetup

Image courtesy of joyosity.

All busy Singaporeans will be happy to know of yet another online store that brings household products right to one’s very doorsteps.

The latest addition to the local e-grocery scene, Redmart, caters to the modern need for efficiency and convenience as more people decide to allocate time away from basic housekeeping matters.

Though grocery e-shopping is not a new thing here in Singapore, the scene, pioneered by Cold Storage in 1997 (refer to this study done in 2000/2001 by ex-NUS student Tan Kok Leng), has been rather dormant in the past decade. Only in the previous year has the concept surged in popularity.

Which makes it a perfect time for sites like RedMart, which isn’t the only startup doing this, to enter the market. Another similar site, Household.sg, made its debut last year.

Comparing the two, they are somewhat on par. However, I find that RedMart, which was started in November 2011, has the slight edge against its competitor.

For one, Redmart offers a unique “My List” program, which operates like a standard grocery list.

Here’s how it works: The products you buy upon your first purchase from the e-store will be stored on the list in the site, tagged with information like the frequency of repurchase, for example, two weeks or one month.

You will then receive an email once it’s time to restock your items, which is as easy as clicking on a link which will bring you immediately to checkout.

Another feature that only Redmart possesses: the ability to select more than one category or brand of items on the left sidebar at the same time.

This means that you need not, for instance, click on Colgate, Pearlie White and Sensodyne individually, and browse through items of each brand on separate instances; you just need to select all three brands consecutively, and the database will display all items from those brands at the same time.

Interesting, but not quite useful? Wait till you see the “sort by price” feature. Items from the three brands are sorted from the least pricey to the most, allowing you to easily find out which product best suits your budget and needs. Not a bad way to shop intelligently, isn’t it?

Other features of the service that might attract customers include: Free delivery on orders above $75, same day delivery on orders placed before 10am, the ability for customers to pick their own two-hour window for delivery, RedDealz, which offers deep daily discounts and weekly deals, and a 15 percent discount for customers ordering items for the first time.

On the site itself, items are cleanly organized into instinctive categories, just as how products in a conventional supermarket are shelved into sections that appeal immediately to the grocery shopper.

Also, there is that all-convenient search function where you can just “heck all” and plug in a keyword and get a list of matches that may be relevant to you.

Of course, Household.sg has some of these elements too, but it falls short when it comes to providing innovative extras such as the “My List” program, which is really RedMart’s “secret recipe” to giving extra value to their customers.

Both stores, however, seem to have a limited product range both within specific brands and across item categories.

I could not, for instance, find my Aussie Dream Organic Rice Milk, which I can’t do without every morning, on either sites. Also, both do not offer any kind of fresh food like fruits, vegetables and fresh milk.

Compare that to Cold Storage’s online counterpart, which offers all kinds of fresh food, from meat and poultry, to seafood.

Here is where RedMart stands out once again: They have a feedback mechanism in place where customers can simply click on a link next to the Search bar to request items that are not being offered.

In response, Roger said that “it is logistically very, very complex to get (selling fresh produce) right and we won’t do anything unless we can do it well.” Ultimately, RedMart’s goal is to get customers what they order, so they only sell what they have in their warehouse.

This is in contrast to the approach where online supermarkets would source for items from their physical stores, only to find out that there’s no stock. So they either replace them with a similar one or refund the customer, after they have made the transaction.

“I may be old fashioned, but I’d rather receive what I ordered!”

For recent features on similar initiatives that deliver convenience to people, check out our articles on LobangClub and SingPet.

About the author

Thoroughly Singaporean, Justin Chua is kiasu and embraces – no, chope – all job roles associated with critiquing, writing and producing creative work: copywriter, screenwriter, editor, critic, playwright, designer…… Youthfully versatile, he is currently in the progress of setting up a freelance Creative business in Writing, Design and related right-brain fields. Catch him on Facebook if you can.

When: Thursday, 12th Jan 2012 and Tuesday, 17th Jan 2012
Time: 2pm – 6pm (Singapore time: UTC/GMT+8)

Inquiries can be directed to innovation@demo.asia.

SGE is proud to be the Official Online Media partner for DEMO Asia 2012. Remember, you can get 5% off your DEMO Asia tickets with the code SGE68S.

Events range from simple get-togethers to full-blown conferences. Get to meet fellow developers, entrepreneurs, startup CEOs & founders, and meet & learn from CEOs of established companies who have seen it all.

Our aim here at SGE is to make it easy for you to pick & choose from the event buffet. Enjoy.

Here are the events for this week. Events are mostly in Singapore (generally 30 minutes drive from anywhere), but we also include key events from around Southeast Asia and beyond.

Saturday 7th January:

(1) Singapore Geek Girls Meetup

Wednesday 11th January:

(1) Singapore PHP User Group Meetup 2012
(2) Web Wednesday

Thursday 12th January
(1) DEMO Asia Auditions for Korean and Japanese companies via Skype

Friday to Sunday 13th-15th January
(1) iConnect 2012

Saturday to Sunday 14th-15th January
(1) The 24hr Business Plan Challenge

Image courtesy of joyosity.

Get 5% off your DEMO Asia tickets with the code SGE68S