It is a non-profit organization founded by a team of young Singaporeans who are driven by a passion for clean technology, sustainable development, the environment, and a desire to invoke change through their actions.

The Cleantech Open is the world’s largest clean technology business competition. The competition hopes to attract the best clean technology ideas from around the world. Ideas can range from revolutionary ways to generate clean energy to better water filtration to ideas about how governmental policies around climate change can foster new businesses in one of the competition categories.

If your idea beats out the competition in your National Competition, you get to represent Singapore as a Global Ideas finalist at the annual Cleantech Open Awards Gala on November 17, 2010 in San Francisco.

The competition ends on the 30th of September at 2359 hours.

2. Submit your pitch online via your registered account.

Your pitch should be based on these 5 concepts:

i. Your idea is: (describe in 200 words)
ii. The problem your idea solves is: (describe the value proposition)
iii. The market for your idea is: (describe who will buy the product/service)
iv. Your idea will have a positive effect on the environment because: (describe the environmental impact)
v. Your idea is a winning one because: (describe the unique competitive advantage)

3.Wait for the judging to begin at the end of October.

If you are named as your Singapore’s finalist, you will make a 5-minute video which will be presented at the Cleantech Open Awards Gala in November.

At the awards, your idea will be presented in a five-minute pitch in front of a crowd of 2,500 investors, entrepreneurs, sponsoring companies, corporations, members of academia, press, and others interested in hearing your ideas and getting involved. The crowd will then vote via text message for the “People’s Choice” and you could win $100,000 in marketing support, legal advising, conferencing services and more to help launch your business!

Click here for more details.

That is true. On hindsight, we should not have posted the job openings together with the news that Facebook was setting up an office here.

Facebook setting up shop in Singapore and hiring for jobs is indeed big news, news that leads to additional traffic for our site. However, since we have moved to a model where announcements for job opportunities for local startups are done in tandem with paid listings on the job board managed by us and promoted by our partners, this inconsistency with free publicity for jobs at Facebook is indeed glaring.

I have removed any mention of the current job opportunities offered in the post.

Moving forward, even though it will be big news when big boys like Facebook start a hiring spree in Singapore, we will not be covering it on SGE unless a paid listing is done on the job board like the rest of our local startups.

We have always been about building the local entrepreneurship community and promoting awareness of it. Important to achieving these goals is extending equal treatment to the local startups as well as to the bigger players.

I would like to thank our reader who cared enough to share with us his concerns.

Gwen

Each city’s Digest is handpicked and curated by a member of that city’s startup community.

And…we are happy to announce that we will be curating the Singapore chapter of [Startup Digest]!

For our usual readers and subscribers who are already receiving our weekly newsletter via our Facebook Page and Group, there is no need for you to change any habits on your side.

We fully intend to continue these newsletters as we know that each of you have your own individual preferences as to how you want to keep in touch with the happenings in the Singapore entrepreneurship scene via SGE.

The good news is this: while we are curating the events-only newsletter that is the [Startup Digest], we will also finally be rolling out our email newsletter to better serve those who prefer an email chock-full of SGE goodness in their mailbox each week.”

But that’s not it.

Email newsletter subscribers will be able to get specials like early, first looks at new startups and special discounts to events.

While SGE’s newsletters zoom in on the local business community and entrepreneurship landscape, we recommend the [Startup Digest] for those who are more mobile, to keep up-to-date on the happenings in the other hotbeds of entrepreneurship around the world.

To put it simply, we have a few options for you to keep tabs on SGE:

Of course, you can also follow us on Twitter.

(If you want to partner SGE to reach out to our readers, contact us.)

What is in in for you?

Get up close and personal with the illustrious international investor panel of iMATCH who will be seated on the famous beds of supperclub Singapore. If you are an entrepreneur present at the event, pick the investors you want to speak to, throw your business card into their respective lucky draw bowls, and get lucky when they pick out yours. Then get to cozy up to the investor on the comfortable beds of supperclub, ask a question, stay, or move on to another investor.

Investors include:

· Ashwin Navin, i/o Ventures
· Paul Bragiel, i/o Ventures
· Jupe Tan, Plug and Play
· John Mactaggart, Australian Association of Angel Investors
· Aydin Senkut, Felicis Ventures
· James Hong, Hot or Not
· Bob Lin, Multi-Dimensional Venture Partners
· Alberto Yépez, Trident Capital

Register now to get In Bed With The Right Investor. You can also register for iMATCH here.

I can hardly wait.

Image courtesy of milena mihaylova.

2009 has been an incredible year for the startup scene in Singapore. Despite the challenges of the painful global economic downturn, we’ve witnessed many of you grow from strength to strength and bringing much needed cheer and excitement to our community.

Over the past few years, SGEntrepreneurs, E27, The Digital Movement, MY Entrepreneurs, HackerspaceSG and Young Upstarts have been actively supporting local and regional startups to grow your exposure and awareness, and even markets for your products and services. We’ve also been supporting your growth, putting up job listings for free to help you find suitable talents for your startups.

Today, we are excited to share with you a part of our plan to take this support to another level. We are glad to announce the introduction of Triple Point Job Board, a job listings service that will be rolled out across all partner sites to help startups find suitable human resource talent.

This application was developed to help facilitate and deal with the increasing demand for job listings across partner sites. In addition, we hope that through this arrangement, we can offer greater value to startups, advertisers and other partners through access to all our sites at the same time.

We would like to state upfront that Triple Point Job Board will not be a free service (click here to see the rates). We recognize that some of you will not be happy to be charged for a service that you previously have gotten free from partner sites. However, we believe that the fees offered for the service are nominal and extremely fair.

Any proceeds – which, as you can imagine, is likely to be a pittance anyway – go towards the development and maintenance of the service. Any left over will inherently be ploughed back into supporting the local startup communities. For a start, any existing job listings within the past two months that are currently on the partner sites will be converted for free for a month on Triple Point Job Board.

We’re hopeful that you share our vision for a more cooperative, close-knit startup community. We’d love to hear your feedback on Triple Point Job Board. Feel free to contact us for any clarification.

Wishing you greetings for the festive season,

SGEntrepreneurs
E27
The Digital Movement
MY Entrepreneurs
HackerspaceSG
Young Upstarts

Image courtesy of Sam Felder.

A new beginning. That’s what this 4th State of Our Site is about. The beautiful picture above signifies how I see SGEntrepreneurs (SGE) – as a seedling with much more room to sprout and bloom. Yes, we are 4 years old, but we are also very young in many other ways.

When Bernard, Weichang and myself started SGEntrepreneurs.com those few years ago, it was only something we did out of passion and on a part-time basis. But we have since focused our energies and several months ago, incorporated a company that legally solidifies our commitment to growing SGE. While Bernard has primarily been the main driving force behind SGE, he has since taken more of a backseat with me stepping up to be Chief Editor (and Managing Director).

I continue to juggle my role as an investor (outside of SGE) and the editorial and managerial duties required by the site. And as always, we maintain a neutral stance and do not allow any conflict of interest to sway articles one way or the other on SGE. We adhere to the policy of disclosure when companies in articles have had some other prior dealing with us (for example, the most common case is when Bernard and my firm, Thymos Capital has invested in the company).

Over the years, we have had several changes to the look and feel of the site. As recently as a few months ago, we had another revamp of our site to attempt to make it a little easier to navigate the various topics and themes. I thought the new version was great as it was a step up from our previous, but now we are yet again working on another new iteration of the site. (We are never ever fully satisfied.) So do watch out for the change.

Back in Oct 2006. One of the earlier iterations of the site.

We also continued to attend the many entrepreneurial, technology-focused, forward-thinking and multi-disciplinary events organized by our partners and friends in Singapore and Malaysia. Events like BarCamp Singapore, BarCamp KL and Johor, TEDxKL (where Bernard met acclaimed film director Yasmin Ahmad who just a few days ago left this world – may her soul rest in peace), TEDxSentosa, Blogout and Web In Travel particularly stood out in their scale and engagement of a wide diversity of peoples.

Adding to the breadth of articles and authorship of SGE, we brought on a few other guest contributors like entrepreneur and venture capitalist, William Klippgen (sold his company to Yahoo! for around 0.5B euros!) and Aaron Chua, member of the founding team of the Interactive Digital Media Programme Office.

To stay true to our underlying goal of helping startups, one way SGE did so again was through teaming up with Microsoft in their Microsoft BizSpark programme to provide young companies with free software, support and network to jumpstart their businesses.

Over this past year, we have also been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with sponsors such as the Action Community of Entrepreneurship (ACE), iHipo, DeveloperWerkz, CoWork.asia, ManyTutors, Foundation for Youth Social Entrepreneurship and Social Networking World Forum Asia. We thank them for their support and look forward to continue engaging them and new sponsors who may come into the SGE family.

On April Fool’s this year, we had a mini hoax of our own whereby we collaborated with Malaysia Entrepreneurs (MYE) to make it seem as if I were to be their new Chief Editor. While that did fool a few people with some Malaysians even asking to meet the “new MYE Chief Editor” (me) at BarCamp KL, it wasn’t to be.

At that time, all we wanted to do was to test the plausibility of that engagement in people’s minds. Though I thought that I had made it as ridiculous as I could with apparent diving holidays sponsored by MYE, we realized that some actually embraced the idea. In the months ahead, SGE and MYE will be exploring deeper partnership opportunities to serve the community better and we hope to share these plans with you soon.

Helping us in this endeavor is new addition to the SGE team, Nicholas Aaron Khoo. Nicholas is a web developer, gadget geek turned serial entrepreneur and now blogger and social media aficionado. We are happy to have him as an investor and advisor and we are excited to work with him in charting SGE’s journey moving forward.

To old and new beginnings.

- How To Handle Negative Media Coverage
- 5 Reasons Why You Should Start A Blog Before Doing A Startup
- Ten Ways to Survive the Crunch
- 10 Cost-Cutting Measures – TheAsianParent.com Way
- Stealing Cupid’s Bow

Images courtesy of Sir Mervs and HVargas.

Back in early February, SmartLoans told SGE that they would be launching its site up to the public within two weeks but only just recently kept that promise. This is April. Did this delay harm or help them? When entrepreneurs make known publicly of a release deadline, do you think they should keep to it? In this example, were you eagerly waiting for the launch of SmartLoans and was disappointed? Or did this wait enhance your excitement? We’re curious. Let us know!

Should Entrepreneurs Keep To Their Release Deadlines?

Check out the sidebar on the right to vote!

Photo courtesy of oddsock.

If you haven’t already guessed it, my appointment as Chief Editor of Malaysia Entrepreneurs was meant to be an April Fool’s joke. If my supposed free holiday and apartment weren’t big enough hints for you, I don’t know what else can be. (That’s why you should read the full post!)

Here’s my top five April Fool’s jokes for 2009:

(5) Xbox Alpine Legend.

(4) Flights to Mars for $99!

(3) Gmail Autopilot.

(2) Guardian to be available only on Twitter, after 188 years of ink. “According to unconfirmed rumours, Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, will next month announce plans for a new system of telepathy-based social networking that is expected to render Twitter obsolete within weeks.”

(1) Opera Face Gestures. “Opera’s known for thinking ahead. We recognize the future importance of touch interfaces, but there’s one surface we haven’t yet touched (literally). Get ready to face the future…”

Our joke this year and last year.

Photo courtesy of anarchosyn.