Held yearly in Austin, Texas, SXSW is a place where people meet, new technology showcased, ideas exchanged and new ones emerge.

It was my first time attending the festivities this year, which happened to coincide with the aforementioned first official Singapore delegation. There was a Singapore pavilion which had the startups showcasing their products and even a Singapore party one evening [check out pictures].

Having had a large hand in making the Singapore pavilion happen this year and being encouraged by the results, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) is planning for another Singapore presence at SXSW 2012.

Drawing on lessons learnt from the 2011 festival, there are some changes planned for the 2012. In lieu of a pavilion space, each participating startup will get a 10’x10’ booth of their own. The vision is to have enough companies to form a Singapore Alley that visitors will walk through. This will provide stronger brand identity for individual companies and yet be covered under the umbrella of Singapore’s brand name.

IDA will also look into a SXSW Block Party to draw visitors to the booths, and is planning to work with partners to facilitate personalized 1-to-1 meetings between Singapore startups and SXSW attendees. At the same time, VentureBeat, an influential US tech blog, will select and conduct video interviews the most interesting Singapore startups.

Timeline: Singapore Delegation At SXSW
Singapore Alley Exhibition: 12-15th March 2012

The cost for each start-up is estimated to be US$500 to cover booth space, advertisement, booth setup and related marketing activities. Startups will need to cover their own airfare, transport, SXSW Interactive passes and accommodation. IDA is required to make a decision very soon, so for those who are interested, please send an email to ida_startup@ida.gov.sg.

Next Tuesday 29th November at 930pm, join us for drinks with Sheel Tyle and Abhijeet Muzumdar from 100-year old VC firm, Bessemer Venture Partners. Yes, one hundred years old: Bessemer was founded back in 1911! The firm has an extensive portfolio and some of the companies include Skype, LinkedIn, Yelp, VeriSign, Staples, Hunch (acquired by eBay just this week) and many others.

We’ll be meeting at Hackerspace (Arab Street area) (70A Bussorah Street) for drinks at 930pm. Please register here to allow us to plan the logistics a little better.

Here’s Sheel’s bio:

Sheel Tyle, an analyst based in the New York office, joined BVP in 2010. He looks closely at internet, mobile, and healthcare businesses with a focus on emerging markets.

Sheel is actively involved in and sourced BVP’s investment in Snapdeal (Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd). He is also closely involved with BVP portfolio company Skybox Imaging, where he previously worked on product, marketing and business development, sourcing and closing Skybox’s first commercial customer.

Prior to joining Bessemer, Sheel founded ReSight, a 501c3 nonprofit which democratizes the distribution of eye-care services by turning unemployed rural women into employed “Vision Guardians” who screen others for vision impairments. Separately, he served as the SIG International Fellow at the Reserve Bank of India, India’s central bank, in 2009; worked as a summer analyst for middle market private equity firm Arsenal Capital Partners in 2008; and performed research for the University of Rochester Medical Center in its neurosurgery, cardiology and ophthalmology departments.

Sheel graduated in three years from Stanford University with a B.A. in both human biology and public policy, as well as a graduate certificate from the Stanford School of Engineering in product creation and innovative manufacturing.

Here’s Abhijeet’s bio:

Abhijeet Muzumdar is a senior associate with BVP India in the Mumbai office. Since joining the firm in 2009, he has been closely involved with a number of investments, including www.BharatMatrimony.com (Consim) (Consim), www.Snapdeal.com, Home First Finance Company, and Dhanlaxmi Bank.

Prior to joining Bessemer, Abhijeet was a senior manager at Edelweiss Capital, where he worked on the investment-banking team. He advised clients on raising private capital and on M&A. During his tenure at Edelweiss, he was one of the key members of the team that advised on Aegis BPO’s acquisition of PeopleSupport, one of the largest Indian M&A transactions in the ITeS sector. Among other projects, he advised SpiceJet Limited, India’s leading low-cost air carrier, to raise private capital and advised Spentex Industries to raise capital through India’s first Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP). Prior to Edelweiss, he worked in New York with KPMG’s corporate-finance team and in investment banking at UBS.

Abhijeet holds a bachelors of commerce degree from Narsee Monjee College of Commerce & Economics and an MBA from Adelphi University’s Hagedorn School of Business, where he was on the dean’s list. He also holds a masters of commerce from the University of Mumbai. At Narsee Monjee, Abhijeet won the Best All-Rounder in Academics and Sports Award for three consecutive years. He represented India in tennis at the international level and was ranked among the top five juniors nationally. As a junior, he won several national level tournaments and represented India at the Junior World Youth Cup.

When: Thursday, November 24, 2011
Time: 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM
Where: Hog’s Breath Cafe, Chijmes, 30 Victoria Street, Block A, #01-26/27, Singapore 187996

Register here.

SGE wrote about Wildfire (XingXingHuo in Mandarin) before (exactly one year ago!) when they received their Series A.

A few days ago at the TechVenture 2011 Gala Dinner, I happened to sit next to one of the founders, Christoph Zrenner. We got talking and here we catch up on their progress.

What is the biggest thing that has happened to Wildfire in the past 12 months since we last wrote about you?

A lot of things have happened! When Benjamin Duvall and I started this together with a Chinese partner, Liu Kai, in 2008, we were the proverbial crazy guys with a crazy dream but things have really accelerated since we received VC funding a year ago. We’ve had two industry and China veterans join the team, Marc Rivoira formerly GM at Saatchi and Saatchi X in China, and Claire Pribula, previously VP Sales Asia at a listed consumer analytics company, Acxiom.

When you get those kind of people on board, it really takes the company to the next level. We’ve also taken another strategic investment a few months back from a private investor who is very well networked locally after having founded a number of highly successful businesses in China and SEA.

So things have just been coming together in many meaningful ways for Wildfire, in terms of repeat business from clients, developments on the technology, real strong talent on the team, a great group of investors. Looking back, there was a lot of luck involved, too.

How does it feel to receive the SVCA award?

Doing any start-up is really hard. Doing it in China, let’s just say there are very few examples of successful foreigners who hack it in China. And then, on top of that, trying to establish a new and innovative business model in a market that is growing so fast on all the proven ways of doing things, that’s actually a little crazy. So when SVCA recognized us for what we are doing on the innovation front with this award, it really meant something to all of Wildfire’s team, a recognition of the hard work we’ve all been putting in.

Christoph receiving the Most Innovative Company SVCA 2011 award for Wildfire.

In the beginning, you do a lot of the things you do on faith, because you believe in something, and a little external recognition actually goes a really far way!

What is the biggest thing you’ve learnt in the past year and how are you changing the company to deal with it?

If you look at the marketing industry, you see tremendous amounts of money being spent to bombard consumers with brand messages. Nobody gets fired for spending tens of millions of dollars on a TV campaign. Why? Because TV actually still works pretty well in China. So we’ve had to ask ourselves, what role is there for the sophisticated influencer word-of-mouth media that we provide. Our original motivation was to “fix a broken industry”, to change the way that brands relate to consumers in China where the kind of consumer cynicism you see in the West hasn’t set in yet. Ben’s work with BzzAgent during their early years in the US and Dave Balter’s books on Word-of-Mouth marketing, that is really what inspired us to build a media channel consisting of 100,000s advocate consumers who spread the brand’s message but authentically and in their own words.

Social Media is shifting the power balance from brands to consumers but for a brand to trust their advocates to do the talking, that takes guts. The decision makers on the brand side who took the time to understand the details of our process, how we find, educate, incentivize and measure the performance of brand influencers, they are real marketing heroes: Wildfire’s early adopters from Kraft Foods, The Campbell Soup Company, Bailey’s, Rexona, and others. What we’ve had to learn on our side is that influencer Word-of-Mouth is just one piece of the media mix puzzle and we’ve had to develop the tools to measure and prove how this component amplifies everything else the brand does, whether it’s digital, in stores, TV etc.

In fact, with the real-time tracking technology we developed over the past year, what we can do now goes way beyond word-of-mouth as a media channel: imagine you have access to 100,000 advocates, you know what they really and authentically believe, and you have the tools to deploy them to change ongoing conversations on-line and in the real-world.

Let’s talk a bit more about your technology: are you an ad agency, a media channel or a technology company?

Good question! What we are actually doing is a combination of two things, influencer seeding and social CRM: Influencer seeding means that we have a growing network of 100,000+ influencers (we call them Sparks) and the tools to identify, educate and incentivize the right consumers to spread the brands message (importantly, this is all authentic, they are unpaid volunteers!). Social CRM means that we have the tools to identify relevant conversations as they happen on the online space and in the real-world in Asia Pacific and China.

Based on these capabilities – a private network of people and a proprietary set of technologies – we offer three different products covering the whole product lifecycle. The first is “InfluencerMedia”, that’s using advocate consumers for reaching and impacting targeted consumers. The second is “InfluencerInsight”, which is using the conversations we capture for forward-looking real-world research (as opposed to focus groups and surveys), for example to answer the question of whether a product will succeed or fail in the market. The third is “InfluencerForce” which is the Social CRM product, but we need to keep the details about how this works confidential until the launch in November.

Do you have any general advice for startup founders with an eye on China?

China is hard and you really, really have to want it to succeed. If you can suffer (“eat glass” as one of the judges at Techventure put it today) and are prepared to put at least 3-4 years into an adventure with an uncertain outcome, China is the right place for you at the right time and there are plenty of opportunities to adapt investable business models from the USA to a Chinese context. (Another of the speakers at Techventure described opportunities as buses: don’t run after one you just missed, the next one will come and then you might even get a seat). All the usual advice applies: Build something that people want. Listen to your customer. Don’t run out of money. You can start alone, but don’t run the business alone, you need to have a partner you can rely on.

Cinemacraft’s vision is to enable every mobile device to be transformed into a television. Tapping on the increase in demand for mobile TV and IPTV, Cinemacraft provides consumers with a single platform for content across different formats and brings it together as an interactive media broadcast mobile solution, enabling the experiencing of both live and on-demand video with superior clarity and quality on mobile devices.

The technology is based on their own patented compression and format (Prime Streaming Format) server technologies.

The Cinemacraft mobile delivery ecosystem.

Sandeep Casi, founder of Cinemacraft says that this investment will be used to further product development and early rollouts in their core markets of Japan, Indonesia and India. In addition to this funding round, Cinemacraft has also gotten a grant from Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority specifically for product development in Singapore.

On why Jungle Ventures picked Cinemacraft for their first investment for this technology-focused fund, Amit Anand, Managing Partner says, “Cinemacraft is laying the foundation for a video-powered interactive media network in Asia and we are very excited to be part of this”.

The firm plans to focus this inaugural fund on “significant investments in micro themes that impact consumer behavior in their target geographies”. While mostly sector-agnostic, they will look more closely at the Media & Entertainment, Digital Consumerism, Travel & Hospitality, Human Capital Management, Education and Design industries.

Stickery’s USD 325K seed round consists of Google Ventures, 500 Startups and several strategic investors from the United States, Europe and Asia. This also coincides with the launch of the game: “Mermaid Waters: Adventures of Hana & Cory” (iTunes) for iOS. This game is the first of a serialized adventure and learning platform for preschool children and their parents.

Both Bjorn and Jarrold are old friends and ex-schoolmates of mine from the Stanford-NUS Overseas College program so it was exciting to speak to them again on this new venture of theirs. Here we have a mini Q&A with Bjorn, CEO of Stickery.

I love that you co-founded e27. The conference that the team does, Echelon, has grown to an event that many in the tech startup community look forward to. Tell us about e27 and how you got involved.

Bjorn Lee

You’ve since moved on to co-founding Stickery. Tell us about this startup.

In late 2010, we shut down Jabfish, an iJam-funded startup that was profitable, cash-flow positive but unscalable to start Stickery. Life is short so I live by the “fail-fast” maxim for startups. The idea for Stickery came about when we were selected in November 2010 as the only non-US team for a mobile learning bootcamp by IDEO & Startl, a mobile learning incubator. We bootstrapped Stickery for a while before acceptance into the high-profile AngelPad program on the advice of my ex-Googler mentor, Gokul Rajaram.

What are the top three items on your wishlist now for Stickery?

(1) Building an A team for product
(2) Making children’s games truly useful for parents and not just for distraction valuer for kids
(3) Understanding user needs of parents in the smartphone era

What were your key takeaways from AngelPad?

(1) Real product management advisers are lacking in Singapore. The AngelPad founders launched successful and scalable web products like GMail, AdSense and nothing tops having awesome folks to coach your team.
(2) Investors who have done the gory operational bits before are priceless.
(3) Never stop looking for social proof when fundraising.

How long did you take to raise your USD 325K round?

It took 1 month to figure out the serious guys and 2 months to get all the paperwork done and cash in bank.

Do you have an office in the Bay Area? And in Singapore?

Our product team is in Singapore but I shuttle back and forth between SG and Silicon Valley. I work out of the awesome 500 Startups penthouse office that is the highest point in downtown Mountain View.

You can also find out more about Stickery on Facebook and Twitter.

Trailer for their game, “Mermaid Waters: Adventures of Hana & Cory”:

The company is also hiring iOS engineers with a passion in children’s media and “wants to make a ‘ding in the universe’ (Steve Jobs reference) for children’s gaming in the smartphone era”. (By the way, you should also check out this startups-focused jobs portal that SGE started, with e27 as one of the partners.)

The Forum is the first global think-tank focused on entrepreneurship as a creator of wealth and social justice. Founded in 2008, WEF has been held in Lyon, France for the past three years and this is the first time it is being held outside its home city. Due to take place in Singapore this 2-5 November 2011, this Forum is a culmination of a series of Regional Forums and Junior Forums that took place over the past several months.

The Forum is not open entirely to the public: there are closed door, think-tank members only sessions, but the public can attend some workshops on Friday 4 November from 8am-1230pm at the auditorium of the School of Art, Design & Media at the Nanyang Technological University, and the gala dinner on the 3rd.

Global representation

Out of the 130 think-tank invitees, about 30% are from Europe, 30% from Asia Pacific, 24% from Africa and the Middle East, and 16% from the Americas. It is also noteworthy to state that 40% of these members are women.

Apart from the think-tank members, there will also be about 70-100 delegates consisting of business leaders from Lyon (France) and Zhejiang Province (China), youth representations from the Junior Forums and journalists.

Discussions and recognition

Throughout the entire 3-day Forum, speakers will address topics cutting across entrepreneurial education, Base of the Pyramid, innovation and entrepreneurial cities. Awards will also be given out to recognize “outstanding entrepreneurial achievements and commitment to society”.

There is a huge list of the think-tank members and past award winners and I can’t write them all here, but some winners of the awards last year include Mr Liu Chuan-Zhi, founder of Legend Holdings (parent company of Lenovo), China, and Ms Ela Ramesh Bhatt, founder of Self Employed Women Association, India.

A small spotlight on women-oriented initiatives

Ms Bhatt is not the only one establishing projects targeted at women. In Asia, Dr Mooryati Soedibyo founded the Women Entrepreneurship Academy in Indonesia. The Academy offers a Ministry of Education of Indonesia-recognized non-degree education to women to improve work and business development skills.

Slightly further away from home, we have Mrs Sabetha Mwambenja in Tanzania. She has founded the Covenant Bank for Women Tanzania, a community bank to serve women and young entrepreneurs.

SGE is Media Partner for WEF

In this women entrepreneurs light, I wish to close this post to announce that we are extremely excited and honored to be Media Partner for the World Entrepreneurship Forum. See you there in a month.