More than just a contest, Start-Up@Singapore provides all participants with opportunities to get professional advice, networking sessions and the chance to pitch your ideas to venture capitalists!

To participate, simply register and submit a three-page executive summary by the Singapore time, 23rd of January 2011 (2359hrs).

Frozen soy

Verleen and her business partner Alan Phua are offering Singapore a solution, a guilty pleasure without the guilt – frozen soy. The Start-Up@Singapore (S@S) Public Relations department met up with the two young entrepreneurs who won S@S in the open category last year. Despite their busy schedules devoted to their start-up, Verleen and Alan shared with us many insights regarding the business and their experiences of entrepreneurship.

The main selling point of Soyato is the innovation of frozen soy. Its conception was based on the popularity of both ice cream and yoghurt. Perceiving a gap between the two products and realising the limitations of a female-oriented yoghurt market, Verleen and Alan developed the notion of a soy-based dessert free of both milk and eggs.

Their product is in fact even healthier than commercial yoghurt, which masks its sourness with high sugar content. With soy milk as its base, not only can Soyato cater to pockets such as the vegan, vegetarian and lactose intolerant, they provide for anyone who enjoys their ice cream but prefers a healthy alternative. Simply put, Soyato is giving us the best of both worlds.

Future plans

Beginning with nothing but an idea like any other start-up company, Soyato has developed a concrete business plan for expansion. From 4 basic flavours, the dessert now comes in 20 different tastes. They are also opening their first retail store by the end of 2010. When asked about their vision for the company, Verleen and Alan expressed plans to open 3 stores in 1 ½ years and penetrate not just Asian but Western markets.

A strong foundation is required for success

As young graduates, they have big and admirable plans for Soyato. Yet, their ambition and verve are complemented by a cautious awareness that a strong foundation is required for success. Verleen and Alan recognise the need to resolve issues with back-up operations before expansion can be materialised. To tackle foundation operational issues, they have thought of pre-packing ingredients in the production process as to ensure consistency and a high level of quality. However, they also realise the ‘people factor’ is the most difficult problem to work on.

Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs

What advice do Verleen and Alan have for budding entrepreneurs? They encourage young students to have a vision. It is never too early to plan for your business. They also advise youths to join business plan competitions. The process of such a competition forces one to think through concrete plans to implement one’s business idea. Winning the competition is not as important as getting the feedback necessary for start-up companies. Also, a competition imposes a deadline, which forces the participants to stay on track with development.

Verleen and Alan were themselves final-year students when they participated in Start-up@Singapore 2009. S@S has provided them with opportunities to develop their business route and to create a plan that is more than just a product. Even after the competition, they were placed in many settings to conduct networking. Sometimes working at the National University of Singapore incubation hub, they have also received much help from the school.

Throughout the interview, Verleen and Alan were both eager to share their experiences and ideas. We hope to see many more of such young innovative talents to contribute to Singapore’s entrepreneurial landscape.

Soyato on Facebook and Twitter.

Written by He Yining, he.yining@startup.org.sg.

This article is brought to you by 12th Start-Up@Singapore. Visit Startup.org.sg for more highlights.

Existing search and retrieval techniques are either text-based or content-based or a combination of both. These approaches are ineffective for abstract or complex queries from users. For a more efficient and effective web-scale media search, there is a need to move from text-based search to a concept-based search to overcome semantic gaps. There is also a need for techniques to perform large-scale indexing of multimedia features to help organisations and individuals cope with this unprecedented flood of media-rich material.

NUS researchers from the School of Computing are pioneering a new generation of media search technologies, spanning from web-scale image/video search to multilingual search, scanned text search and speech-based search.

In this seminar, our researchers will share some of their cutting-edge research results in media search technologies with you. For more details, read the abstracts and biographies of our distinguished speakers below.

Keynote Speaker: Mr Michael Yap, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Media Development Authority
Industry Guest Speaker: Mr Loo Cheng Chuan, Principal, SingTel

Prof. Chua Tat Seng: Interactive Web-Scale Media Search

This talk focuses on recent research efforts in interactive Web-scale media search. It will first discuss the progress in searching for answers in community question-answering sites such as Yahoo!Answers. It then describes three research directions that are critical to the realisation of Web-scale image/video search – namely, visual concept annotation, indexing, and interactive search strategies. The talk concludes with remarks on future research in searching for live media contents on the Web.

Dr. Wang Ye: Mobile music retrieval and its applications

Mobile music retrieval has gained popularity, particularly in the form of smart phone applications. This talk focuses on recent research in this domain, including current system infrastructure and datasets. Two applications scenarios – healthcare and edutainment – will be described through a live demo. In healthcare for example, music therapy research has shown that the use of familiar tempo-matched auditory stimuli helps in the therapeutic gait training of patients with Parkinson’s disease. A music retrieval system has been developed that will help therapists locate music pieces that have specific tempo, cultural and beat strength features.

A/Prof. Ng Hwee Tou: Machine Translation and Multilingual Search

Web pages on the Internet are written in a multitude of languages. Machine translation allows the automatic translation of text from one natural language into another, which facilitates information access and search for content written in another unfamiliar language. This talk will present current research in machine translation, in which a computer learns how to translate from millions of words of parallel texts in multiple languages. Two research issues are highlighted: translation that disambiguates the meaning of words, and translation of resource-poor languages.

Dr. Sim Khe Chai: Spoken Document Retrieval

Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) is a task of retrieving relevant spoken documents (audio/video files containing speech) from a collection of documents based on user queries. SDR relies on both automatic speech recognition and text-based information retrieval technologies. The contents of the talk include introduction to these technologies, related research activities at the university, industrial applications and demonstrations.

Prof. Tan Chew Lim: Document Image Retrieval

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the predominant approach to obtain textual information from scanned documents. However, OCR has inherent shortcomings: language dependency, slow speed, and vulnerability to degraded image quality. We propose the use of word shape coding and holistic word spotting to make up for the deficiencies. After getting the textual information, retrieval can be conducted on the text level with text retrieval techniques.

Prof. Mohan Kankanhalli: Management of Surveillance Data

With rising concerns about security in our society, we have witnessed an increase in the deployment of surveillance systems. Surveillance systems usually employ a number of video cameras. We will show that a surveillance system is really a search system. We will discuss the following topics which are related to surveillance data management:

How to determine the correct number of video cameras to be deployed?
How to transform the raw video data into useful information which can be used for situation monitoring?
An event-processing architecture for surveillance data management.

When: Thursday 12th August 2010, 2pm to 5pm
Where: Seminar Room, Level 1, I3 Building, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613 [map]
Cost: Free

Register here.

Participants emerged from an enriching journey of workshops, consultations and mentoring sessions organized by Start-Up@Singapore to take home a total of $50,000 in cash prizes.

The champion team of the open category is Soyato made up of two students: Phua Wei Quan and Verleen Goh. They proposed a soy-based dessert of the same name. Soyato is currently sold at mobile stalls, but the team is planning to invest their prize money of $20,000 in a physical store.

The Soyato team.

Also winners are Coating Concepts and TAPP. Coating Concepts aims to revolutionize cutting operations with its self-lubricating coating product. TAPP is a freeware dynamic address book for the smartphone, which updates itself when your contacts change their information.

The champion of the youth category is Towless, a team that aims to bring convenience to many through their toiletries vending machines. Teams Jollyphony and TheCaviarLab also had their share of victory with their exciting ideas of a free gaming website and fruit caviar.

All the winners.

If you want the opportunity to take part in next year’s competition and bootcamps, watch this space!

Here are the team names and their ideas in a few words:

Open Category Finalists

Powerhouse are a group of Business Administration students looking for new approaches in marketing. Their solution?For-eve.com is the first exclusive all-female try before you buy cosmetics website inSingapore. It replaces the traditional department stores by customizing and bringing the shopping experience to the comforts of the females’ homes.

The shift in consumer preference for eating healthily has led to searches for healthier frozen desserts that still satisfies their taste buds.Observing the trends, a brand new category of frozen dessert can be created in frozen soy, which possesses great product versatility and business potential. We call this product innovation, Soyato.

TAPP is a new way of exchanging your contact information, and keeping it up to date. We have developed a FREE to download dynamic address book for the smartphone, which updates itself when your contacts change their information. Do you have 2 phones? Use TAPP to synchronize your contacts. When you get a new phone, download TAPP, log-in, and access all your contacts straight-away. When you and your contacts are on TAPP, you can message each other for FREE.

Through innovative fusion of fingerprint and face recognition technologies, Real-ID establishes identity of people in emerging countries and prevents identity fraud wirelessly and in real-time.

Coating Concepts Pte Ltd‘s first product poised to be commercialised is a coating that enables self lubrication in high speed cutting operations.The company’s vision is to provide state of the art coating solutions for industrial and consumer applications.

GIVEsingapore is a group of young minds coming together to bring exciting innovation to how we can make the world a better place. Anyone from any background, race, religion or culture is welcomed to be part of Team GIVE. All you need to have is the believe that the world is amazing. If you want to meet us, just drop by at our cozy incubation space within NUS.

Youth Category Finalists

Genesis represents a new beginning. Our business is to rehabilitate lands that were former logging sites (known as dormant land) and turn them once again into productive sites. Genesis will address the issue of deforestation by rehabilitating the forests and the issue of poverty by providing jobs to the indigenous people.

Jollyphony is a website that provides a definitive compilation of non-commercial games i.e. icebreakers, bonding games, traditional games for users who require the use of these games anytime, anywhere.

Nineteen: Two nineteen year-olds with big aspirations in business and an even bigger passion for entrepreneurship. With unique ideas and practical business concepts, we possess the “midas” touch. Having a great interest in the F&B industry, we aspire to revolutionize how a business operates in Singapore’s F&B industry and strive to be Singapore’s leading F&B brand.

TheCaviarLab aims to bring fruit caviar to the mass population, to allow people of all ages to enjoy this. We intend to bring out the uniqueness of the product through drinks, in this case healthy drinks, fruit juices and mock-tails.

Tow-less aims to bring convenience to toilet users by dispensing good quality, affordable toiletries for one-time use by installing vending machines in these facilities.

Congratulations to the finalists!

11th S@S Awards Ceremony

If you’re interested in what got them to the finals, come on down to the 11th S@S Awards Ceremony this year:

Date: Saturday 29th May 2010
Time: 2:30pm – 5:30pm
Venue: DBS Auditorium, Tower 1, 6 Shenton way
GOH: Mr. Lui Tuck Yew, Acting ICA Minister
Attire: Formal (Shirt without tie)

RSVP now!

RSVP now!

Participants were in teams of 2 to 4 members and had to develop from scratch an idea that fit into any one of the three emerging industries introduced to them during the first part of the challenge – namely the Silver Industry, Social Entrepreneurship and Interactive Digital Media. At the end of it, they were to submit a 3-page executive summary for the 24 Hour Biz Plan Challenge and prepare a short 3 minute pitch to be presented to a panel of judges.

Speakers for the day included…

- Mr Alvin Lim, CEO of Bizlink Centre Singapore Ltd, on Social Entrepreneurship
- Mr Paul Southern, Director forTV, Video & Music Platforms (Asia) at Microsoft on Interactive Digital Media
- Mr. Lee Junior, Managing Director, Silver Capital Investment Pte Ltd sharing about the Silver Industry.
- Dr. Bernard Leong, Co-founder of Chlkboard to teach the participants how to write a sound Executive Summary in under 24 hours

The Ultimate Start-Up Space

Adding to the excitement, was our partner Martell V.S.O.P’s Ultimate Start-Up Space competition. The Ultimate Start-Up Space competition presents a 760 square feet shopfront space at Clarke Quay open to the imagination of budding entrepreneurs on how they wish to use it – as a flagship store for their idea, a retail outlet or even a business/advertising showcase for their ideas.

All participants have to do is to present a 1 minute pitch on how they would use this space to develop their business idea. Whether or not the the participants ideas fully leveraged on the space presented to them, having them think about how to use the space to accommodate their idea on silver industry, social entrepreneurship or interactive digital media was in itself, a good thinking exercise on how they would do their marketing if their idea materialised. The Ultimate Start-Up Space portal is still open for submission of ideas until the 12th February 2010.

Winners of the 24 Hour Biz Plan Challenge

At the end of the 2 day event and a 3-minute pitch to a panel of distinguished judges, a winner from each category was chosen. These winners also move onto the semi-finals stage of the 11th Start-Up@Singapore.

Smiles

In Tamil Nadu, India, 80% of rural farmers live below the poverty line of USD 1 a day. This poverty stems from a systematic inability to grow income sources due to land degradation. Specifically in our target districts of Tiruchirapalli and Karur, only 25% of land is arable. Team Smiles breakthrough business model – MicroMacro is an organic agriculture micro-investment social enterprise that is currently focused on empowering farmers in Tamil Nadu, India to increase plot utilization and alleviate poverty.

Team Smiles

Barely in their 20s, Smiles’s founder, Ivan Chang and Keith Tan have set ablaze the local social enterprise scene. Currently, Ivan Chang is pursuing a degree in Business Administration from SMU and awaiting for his CPA qualification. Keith Tan will be heading toward NUS for an undergraduate study in Architecture. Together, they hope to continue raise the bar for innovation and enterprise.

SilverConnect

There is no argument that the world is facing an aging population, and this presents a great opportunity for businesses to target this market. Yet despite this potential, the over 50s market has been largely ignored. As mass old age is still a relatively new phenomena, companies going into this industry face many uncertainties and an incomplete understanding of the elderly market.

Team SilverConnect

SilverConnect aims to be the full stop to that question. By conducting market research specifically targeting the elderly, we aim to bridge the gap between new and existing businesses and the up and coming silver industry.

With the 24 Hour Biz Plan Challenge, the 11th Start-Up@Singapore has come to the end of the phase of educating and empowering the public on entrepreneurship. Following the executive deadline summary on the 1st Feb 2010, about 30 to 40 semi-finalists will be selected from the large pool of submissions expected to come in. From that group, yet another 12 only will have the opportunity to make it to the finals of the competition that will take place in end May.

Hint: The organiser of this Challenge has partnered with the people behind another challenge, where you can get a chance to win “The Ultimate Start-Up Space” at Clarke Quay! If you are joining the 24 Hour Biz Plan Challenge, be aware of this fact as you might need to integrate this 760 sq ft worth of space into your plan.

While registration just closed, remember that the deadline for the main competition closes on 1st Feb 2010! Get your shot at winning the grand prize of S$20,000 now! And even if you don’t, at least have a shot at the other prizes and have the exposure this national platform provides.

RSVP.

Register here.