Cupcakes from Teacosy are sold alongside angel figurines and furniture.
As technology advances and business concepts evolve, an increasing number of F&B entrepreneurs and service solution providers are thinking out-of-the-box and making life easier for customers.
By innovating, F&B entrepreneurs enjoy reduced overheads, better customer service and additional revenue. Customers feel more satisfied too. In this article, we chart four recent trends in the F&B industry that have dramatically improved how businesses are run.
If you’re a restaurateur or cafe owner, do look at these trends and consider implementing them in your business. Read more
Filed under F&B, Featured, Innovation & Technology, Retail, TechnologyTags: a thousand tales, chope, eordernpay, food icon, pocket full of posies, reserveit.sg, swiff, teacosy, ten thousand angels, wi-serve
It was not a happy year for big bookstores.
In August and September 2011, Borders closed both its outlets in Wheelock Place and Parkway Parade. In October, Computer Book Centre, at Funan IT Mall, followed suit, becoming an exclusively online business.
More bad news followed in December: Home-grown book retailer Page One announced that it will close its store in VivoCity on 19th February this year in VivoCity due to high rentals. The company has been incurring major losses since its opening in 2006. Read more
Filed under Featured, Innovation & Technology, News Stop, Retail, Special Commentary, Technology, WebTags: booksactually, borders, harris bookstore, pageone, the pigeonhole, woods in the books
Imagine a world where all co-working spaces around the world are linked to a talent marketplace. That is the promise of Coworkify, an upcoming Facebook app from Japan which lets users find talent and like-minded people in co-working spaces outside of their own.
The team won the grand prize at Startup Weekend Kyoto 2011, and the founder, Kenshin Fujiwara, told SGE that they are actively partnering with co-working spaces globally. He’s also looking for beta testers to try the app, which is now still in development.
“Already, some space owners from Poland, Germany, Brazil, US, Korea, Australia and so on have agreed to join,” he said. Read more
There were plenty of distractions at Startups in Asia, the first-ever tech startup event organized by Asian tech blog Penn Olson — including a couple of Kimono-clad ladies and helpers in tight skirts.
But the star of the show remained the Startup Arena, a pitching competition where 19 startups vied for the top prize of a US$10,000 check, as well as some Lenovo laptops and Nokia Lumia 800 mobile phones.
The winner, announced yesterday, on day two of the conference, turned out to be Singapore-based startup Teamie, which is building a social learning platform that aims to make learning more fun, social, and intuitive. Read more
Filed under Featured, Innovation & Technology, News Stop, Technology, WebTags: penn olsons, phroni, piktochart, start now, startnow.sg, startup arena, startups in Asia, teamie, waffle
Do Singapore banks measure up in the eyes of start-up entrepreneurs?
In Singapore, it looks like OCBC is the most popular bank among start-up entrepreneurs for creating a business account. That is the result of a poll SGE did on Facebook and LinkedIn in which 127 entrepreneurs responded.
Here’s what we asked them: “As a start-up founder in Singapore, which bank do you go to and set up your local account?”
Actually, OCBC is the leading bank by a mile — at 45 percent of the respondents. The others — DBS (17 percent), UOB (15 percent), and Standard Chartered (13 percent) — were not even close.
With such a yawning gap, it’s easy to assume that OCBC is the best choice for every entrepreneur — but that’s not necessary the case. To find out more, we dug a little deeper — speaking to entrepreneurs and comparing the different banks ourselves. Read more
Chaos Gate will be released in China in April this year.
Developing computer games is risky business. More so, if you’re creating a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), which requires a massive investment in capital and time.
But that is the risk Singapore-based Time Voyager‘s founder and CEO Chris Loo is willing to take. By developing their first title — Chaos Gate – for the fast-growing China market, they could potentially reap big rewards. Last year, a report revealed that sales from the China games market reached US$7B last year, a 32.4 percent year-on-year increase.
Time Voyager’s risk-taking spirit is something Canon’s Think Big campaign aims to promote. Think Big encourages entrepreneurs to not just earn a profit, but also to expand their business horizons by doing what was thought to be impossible. Read more
A client approached us recently to help sell his business. He designs, manufactures and sells designer greeting cards.
He has run the company for a few years and found it difficult to run multiple companies, so he has decided to sell one and focus on running the other.
He approached us for advice on how to sell his company and value his business. To begin, we collected a few facts so we could get a sense of what kind of business we are selling. Read more
Globally, PayPal is the dominant online payment solution. Often, you aren’t an online merchant if you don’t have an option for users to pay for your goods via PayPal.
But in Asia, PayPal’s not the only kid in the online payment neighborhood. In fact, over the years, numerous alternatives have sprung up in the region, sometimes even beating the payment giant in market share in their respective countries.
Furthermore, in emerging markets, ubiquitous Internet services are not always readily available, which means over-the-counter payment remains popular in those places.
So, if you’re an entrepreneur keen on regional or global expansion, understanding the market and the key players is an important first step. To help you, we’ve compiled this constantly-updated list to keep you abreast of the latest developments in Asia. Read more
Filed under Featured, Innovation & Technology, Mobile, Technology, WebTags: 99Bill, Alipay, chinapay, E-Commerce, m - commerce, mobile payment, MOL, online payment, online payment gateway, paydollar, paysbuy, swiff, tenpay
Facebook is the ultimate acqhire company.
Acqhire is the new buzzword referring to an exit strategy when big tech companies purchase small companies, primarily as a talent recruitment strategy, sometimes with a significant signing bonus.
So far, to the best of my knowledge, it only happens in the US.
Facebook is probably the most well-known company involved in such takeover types. It started with several companies: Friendfeed, Beluga and most recently, Gowalla. Several investors (or tech pundits) for example, Mike Arrington & Jason Calacanis have provided their perspectives on the acqhire issue specifically on the Gowalla case. Hence I thought it might be interesting topic to examine in Asia.
In my own humble opinion, I don’t think that it will ever happen for tech companies in Asia and here are several reasons why:
Read more
Chinese New Year just wouldn’t be Chinese New Year without the feasting. It’s a time of gathering together over a simmering steamboat and roasted duck, and getting your fingers slick with oil from a tasty slice of bakkwa. Unfortunately, it’s also the occasion where we pile on the calories.
Which means it’s time to bring out our running shoes to undo the damage.
But exercise is not something that comes easily to busy urbanites like us, who work twelve hours a day and are not kinesthetically-inclined.
That’s a problem entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia are trying to solve. Exercise can be a chore, but it can also be fun, with the right approach. Here are a few startups that are trying to bring us one step closer towards fitness nirvana: Read more
