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

Much Ado About ACRA Annual Returns For A Startup

Startups usually have a bunch of tech and business people who are usually clueless about accounting, and even if they do, the rules and regulations involving the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority Singapore (ACRA) might baffle them.

Here, co-founder of local company Bloomerang, the team behind bloomerHang® – completely biodegradable and recyclable cardboard clothing hangers with advertising on them – Wong Joon Ian talks about his experiences trying to file his annual returns and provides a case study for other startups. (You can also check out our interview with him.) Read more

8 Tips to Setting Up Your Food and Beverage Business in Singapore

The Food-and-Beverage (F & B) services industry is booming in Singapore. In view of the upcoming launch of the Integrated Resorts (IR), the F & B services industry is set to see phenomenal growth in the next 5 years. From 4,489 in 2005, the number of F & B establishments has surged significantly to 4,900 in 2006 (a short 1 year span).

Increasingly, students from renowned institutions such as ITE and SHATEC look forward to honing their entrepreneurial skills after graduation by setting up their own F&B brand names. This trend could be attributed to the swell in media attention placed on the F & B industry in recent years. Read more

A Foreign Entrepreneur Finds It Hard To Scale A Team In Singapore

French entrepreneur Hugo Angelmar has been based in Singapore working on a startup he co-founded with a few others. Here, he shares his experiences on trying to find computer scientists in Singapore. Read more

The Difference That is Invent Singapore

This was written by Guest Contributor, Abhinav Jain.

Never thought in just one day I’ll be learning things which will put me miles ahead to realize my dream of a greener world. 7 hours on a weekend, amazing talks and discussions by prominent speakers, a knowledge-hungry audience and diligent planning and effort of the organizers – that was all it took (plus some) for Invent 09 Singapore conference to become a prominent conference for budding entrepreneurs and inventors.

With the courtesy of SGEntrepreneurs (who selected me in one of their competitions), I managed to attend the conference on the beautiful morning of 24th October 09. 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

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

Government Provides Subsidies to Upgrade your Book-Keeping Capabilities

Is your finance department having a hard time keeping compliant with the XBML format for submission of your annual returns? Maybe you have considered upgrading your book-keeping capabilities but have been holding back because the economic climate looks glum and you want to stretch every dollar? Well, now is the best time to take advantage of this new government subsidy and get that accounting software package. Read more

Ideas for the Economic Strategies Committee Solicited

Guest contributor, Prof Wong Poh Kam is part of the National University of Singapore (NUS) taskforce to give inputs to the government-led initiative, the Economic Strategies Committee (ESC). Out of the broad range of topics covered, one of Prof Wong’s task is also to solicit ideas as to how to improve the Singapore entrepreneurial support ecosystem. Here, he explains the initiative and seeks your ideas. Read more

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