Attracting Angels And Cross-Border Investment Across Asia

The recent Singapore Budget 2010 announcement of a new tax incentive for angel investors is only one of the efforts in Singapore in attracting more angel investment in Singapore. The Business Angel Network of Southeast Asia (BANSEA) recently organised the inaugural Asian Business Angel Forum (ABAF) held last week over 2 days here in Singapore. The primary aim of ABAF was to talk about cross-border angel investment and to help exchange ideas and discuss the possibility of an Asian Business Angel Network (ABAN). Read more

Is Secrecy Always A Good Thing? The Tale of Apple Aperture vs Adobe Lightroom

Apple is known for its penchant for secrecy. Products are developed as top-secret projects and unveiled to the public with great fanfare. This has brought it tremendous benefit, for example with during the dramatic launch of the iPhone by Steve Jobs. However secrecy carries costs, and in some cases the costs outweigh the benefits.

Apple & Its Culture of Secrecy

Yet Apple retains this approach across a whole range of its products; secrecy is apparently “baked into the corporate culture”. Read more

5 Tech Entrepreneurship events that rocked SG in 2009

It’s that time of the year when we actually review what has gone past a turbulent year 2009 and probably a year after the financial crisis that rocked the world after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in Sep 2008. Of course, one of the key after effects is that fundraising for start-ups in the technology space become increasingly difficult this year. While we are beginning to see more and more acquisitions in the US tech space, the SG tech start-ups are still working towards a tough environment. In the technology entrepreneurship scene, significant incidents have shaped and brought forward new perspectives in Singapore. While we are about to start the new road ahead in 2010. Here are the top 5 tech entrepreneurship events that rocked SG in 2009 (in no order of preference): Read more

Fusion Garage Strikes Back: From CrunchPad to JooJoo

The very public fallout between US-based TechCrunch and Singapore-based Fusion Garage was publicised, analysed and critiqued to no end, but was just based solely on the TechCrunch side of things. Last Monday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch made the declaration of the end of CrunchPad and claimed that they will file a litigation against Fusion Garage. Within the tech community across the world, we were left wondering what had happened and have been waiting to hear Fusion Garage’s side of the story. The long awaited media event from Fusion Garage finally happened about an hour ago as the CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, took the stage through a live streaming video conference and conveyed three main points: (1) the fallout with TechCrunch and reply to Mike Arrington’s claims, (2) a demo of JooJoo (it’s no longer called CrunchPad) and (3) the product specs and pricing of JooJoo. We offer a narrative account on what transpired during the live-tweeting that went along with the video conference from Chandra. Read more

RIP CrunchPad

The CrunchPad (the picture from the left sourced from TechCrunch), a product collaboration between TechCrunch and Fusion Garage has been one of the achievements hailed by many here in Singapore, giving hope that there might be something finally to go beyond Creative against Apple (where they lost the mp3 player war). However, we just received word from TechCrunch with the announcement from Michael Arrington making the declaration: “It’s a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so…final…is a very hard thing to do. I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just…sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool.”. We review what has happened from the expose written by Mike Arrington Read more

Co-Workers of the World, Unite at Hackerspace.SG

Are you passionate about technology? Do you want to turn your idea into a prototype? Are you interested in meeting people with similar interests and curiosity to test new ideas? Chua Ruiwen, Wong Meng Weng, Luther Goh, and Justin Lee talks about a new initiative Hackerspace SG that they have put together that involved all technologists, entrepreneurs, innovators and developers. Read more

The Blue Sky in Zhong Guan Cun, Beijing

If there is a potential candidate which can pose as an alternative to the Silicon Valley in California, Zhong Guan Cun in Beijing is possibly the only candidate in the present. The best benchmarks are perhaps the amount of talent, the vast market size, the successful tech companies (Baidu, Lenovo and the Founder Group) that rose from China and the amount of venture capital that has turned up in Beijing from US, for e.g. Sequoia China. While traveling to Beijing, I took a nice walk around the technology cluster under a clear blue sky during the 60th National Day Celebrations in China. Read more

King Kong and App Distribution

Fresh from receiving updates on Nokia’s Ovi app store in Kuala Lumpur last week, this geek is now hearing about the launch of the Intel Atom Developer Program (IADP) in the Intel Developer Forum 2009 in San Francisco. An Intel netbook app store will be launched soon in conjuction with IADP.

From the initial groan of hearing about more app stores, this geek concludes that app stores should be the way forward as we move towards the attention economy. To quote something I heard at Nokia One Connected World conference in Kuala Lumpur last week, “if content is King, then distribution is King Kong!”

Well, our dear friend “King Kong” has to evolve as distribution models have changed drastically in this day and age. As compared to developers trying to market and distribute their apps all by themselves with limited resources, they can now Read more

On Intellectual Property and Online Strategy

Major battles are being fought on the internet over intellectual property. The founders of the Pirate Bay now face a jail sentence, the recording industry recently won a $1.92 million verdict against an American woman for downloading 24 songs, and in Australia the internet service provider iiNet is being sued by movie studios for allowing illegal downloads. Read more

Why we need more GeekCamps in Singapore

Last Saturday on 22 August 2009, GeekCamp finally took place at the Yahoo! Asia office in Suntec City, Singapore. It drew between 80 to 100 people from 9 am to 7pm. It was organized by an enthusiastic community of geeks who develop for the web or engaged in some form of scientific research related to computing. While scrambling across topics on cloud computing, web and mobile development from Ruby, Python-Django, Android and iPhone, it has an almost full fledged view that it’s an event totally designed for technologists. Given that there are many developer communities in Singapore but with very few members (with no critical mass, maybe the PHP User Group or ASP developers), this is a good event to aggregate them together so that we all can share ideas. Here are some reasons why we need more of these GeekCamps in Singapore: Read more

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