2011 has turned out to be a breakout year for mobile commerce in Singapore, says PayPal‘s Online and Mobile Shopping Insights 2011 study.
The report has revealed that the country’s mobile commerce market has grown by 660 percent reach S$328M (US$259M) last year from S4$3M (US$33M) in 2010.
The study was conducted by The Nielsen Company online using a representative sample of 1,009 Singaporean online shoppers aged 18 and above. 482 of them are mobile shoppers, which in this study means that they have shopped or made purchases using a mobile phone or tablet.
The mobile commerce market is expected to grow ten-fold to reach S$3.1B (US$2.45B) in 2015, indicating that shopping on mobile devices has become mainstream due to the ubiquity of such devices. Read more
Filed under Featured, Innovation & Technology, Mobile, News Stop, TechnologyTags: m - commerce, Mobile Commerce, PayPal, qr code, qr codes, showbiz asia, Singapore, smrt
When Daniel Charles, the founder and CEO of Global Racing Schools, first decided to get into the racing business, he wanted to open a race track in Singapore. But he realized it would cost about half a billion dollars.
“That may not be the best place to start,” he thought. He decided to scale down, and considered starting a go-cart track instead. But that proved too daunting as well.
Finally, he settled on becoming a dealer for motorsports products. Slogging his way through, Daniel, at 25 years old now, has built Global Racing Schools into a company that connects leisure and professional racers to driving experiences by over 200 suppliers in 20 countries.
“I remember an entrepreneur talking on television about the right way to get into an industry: ‘Don’t focus on getting the whole body in. Start with the toe’,” he says, “if you want to be a DJ, start by carrying amps around. If you want to be the next Zuckerberg, start by hanging around the right places and events.”
Today, the young entrepreneur has offices in Singapore, Australia, and the United States. The avid Formula One fan, looking every bit a professional racer himself with designer shades, watch, and a racing polo-tee, has handled between two to three thousand customers ever since the company was started in 2008. Read more
At ViKi, a staff runs a visitor through what the company does.
Palpable tension was present just before Blk 71 opened their doors to visitor for Walkabout Singapore, held last Friday.
As I sat in one of the offices with Kristine and Vinnie Lauria, co-organizers of the event, we wondered how many people would actually show up. Sure, there were 550 email signups, but there’s no telling how many of them might actually appear at a particular venue.
The worries were soon put to rest. Chatter filled the empty hallways, and a bunch of students stood outside the office, peeking in curiously. Time to get to work.
Held for the first time in Singapore, Walkabout is a one-day event where startups open their doors and bags of potato chips to curious visitors. The event originated with Walkabout New York City, and attempts to replicate the open-door, collaborative nature of Silicon Valley. Read more
Before Perx co-founders Andrew Roth and Jon Sugihara started work on their loyalty card mobile app, which is now the market leader in Singapore, they ran successful daily deals site PLAYhawaii.com. It was on track to generate US$2M in revenue a year.
Based in Hawaii, they expanded their business to Asia, founding Maiplay last year with Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin as an investor and advisor. They launched in Jakarta and Singapore, entering a heated field dominated by Groupon.
However, they dumped their daily deals business within months. They sold PLAYhawaii.com and launched their loyalty card mobile app in October 2011. They’re now based in Singapore.
What sparked the change was their belief that daily deals is a lousy way to acquire loyal customers for merchants. The hunch paid off: At the time of the interview, Perx had close to 40,000 registered users, and about 400 merchants in Singapore, with 10 to 20 new locations each week.
Their partner merchants are not lightweights either. Big brands like Popeyes, Famous Amos, and Dunkin Donuts have come on board. With pole position in the country secured (around!, Pointpal, and Squiryl are competitors), they are now working with a partner to scale their business to other parts of Asia.
“When we call merchants, we really had to tell them not to hang up as we’re not a daily deals company.”
Read more
Filed under Featured, Innovation & Technology, Interviews, Mobile, Retail, TechnologyTags: andrew roth, daily deal, daily deals, E27, Echelon, echelon 2012, group buying, jon sugihara, perx, Singapore, singapore satellite
Watching each startup deliver their pitch at the JFDI-Innov8 2012 Bootcamp Demo Day, I get the sense of witnessing a child taking her first tentative steps or going to school for the very first time.
At the accelerator program, the first of its kind in Singapore, promising entrepreneurs, who had nothing but ideas, had to undergo an intense regimen of mentoring, training, and product development.
Mentors in the bootcamp came from all around the world as well as from Singapore, consisting of entrepreneurs who have gone through the whole agonizing process of creating a product people actually want.
Glancing across the room, amidst the glaring stage lights and about a hundred curious investors, those very same mentors are egging the startups on stage to succeed. The incubatees took turns to demostrate their products: Refined, refreshed, and in some cases, completely rehashed after the 100-day bootcamp. Read more
This was jointly written by Terence Lee and Gwendolyn Regina Tan.
It was a simple party with a few invited guests, some pizza and drinks, a seemingly ordinary networking event at the Chalkboard office in Mount Sophia. No formal announcement was made, but some of the folks knew something was up.
There would be no happy ending for Chalkboard, a Singapore-based mobile advertising startup. The co-founders, Saumil Nanavati and Bernard Leong, decided months earlier to close shop. They were just quietly figuring out a way to do it.
Interestingly, they were very close to getting acquired. Chalkboard was, after all, a pretty attractive target: Sales were coming in, and they were close to breaking even. One interested party was a major firm from Silicon Valley, the other a prominent Singapore company. However, they felt neither acquisition was the right fit.
But despite the setback, neither entrepreneur took it as a personal failure. It had been a team effort all the way. The party was simply a celebration of the journey they’ve taken together with friends.
“We were disappointed it didn’t go the way we wanted, but we were not ashamed, we did the best we could with the smartest people, including the investors who gave their best. We tried,” says Saumil in an interview with SGE on Thursday afternoon.
He and Bernard even came up with an acronym to describe the totality of their experience: MIA (Market, Investors, and Ambition).
Their ambitions for Chalkboard were big enough to match the best entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Their investor, Joi Ito from Singapore’s Neoteny Labs, bought into their vision.
What ultimately caused them to fold was a confluence of factors: The incompatibility between their business model and the Asian market, a weak US venture capital climate after the European Crisis, and the acquisition offers which they felt did their stakeholders (and themselves) injustice. Read more
It was a bad day for Wild Honey, a popular all-breakfast restaurant in Mandarin Gallery, Singapore.
A customer named Gary Tan posted a complaint on the company’s Facebook Page alleging that he has been discriminated against.
Apparently, his request to get a corner table for three for himself and a guest was rejected. However, a foreigner that came in later was able to do the same. Think Rosa Parks, 21st Century version.
What really pissed people off, however, was the response from Guy Wachs, the restaurant’s founder. He said: “Dear sir, we have an international staff including many Singaporeans and respect all people. We deeply regret your remark (emphasis mine). Guy Wachs, Director.”
A screenshot was captured of the comments, which was apparently deleted. It caught fire on the forums (examples here and here) since yesterday: Read more
Update on 23rd April, 2012
NUS sends Alvin a letter saying that a change of decision is “highly unlikely”. Message from Alvin on his site:
“Please note that as you have already been considered for all your previous choices, appealing for the same choices would be highly unlikely to change the university’s prior decision.”
This was the exact words written on the letter that I received from National University of Singapore, which happened to be the same words that got me thinking. To me, the intent was simple, to do something now or not to do anything at all. Nevertheless, I apologize if the website have misled you in any way. :)
A Big Thank You, to the people who have supported me. :)
Just some further clarification, I was offered Computing (Information Systems Courses), and as the skills that the website portrays, and rightly so, there are no majors in Information System Courses that are relevant to me. When I said Computer Science, I meant Computing (Computer Science Courses), which gives me an option to become a Communications and Media Major. I will be then able to specialize in Content Creations and Mass Communications Group (which is User Interaction and Experience) as well as Games Technology Group.
While many students would give up after finding out that they’ve been denied entry to the university course of their choice, Alvin Wang is different.
Not taking it lying down, this IT diploma graduate from Ngee Ann Polytechnic created an online resume at helpalvingetintoschool.com to show off his credentials. He hopes to pursue degree in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The website has caught fire on the interwebs, gaining fans and haters alike. So far, it has already garnered over 11,000 Facebook likes. It’s similar to a website started by Matthew Epstein, called Google please hire me. Read more
Sure, many people use Craigslist and eBay to sell stuff. But they’re designed in an era where PCs were cutting edge and smartphones were nothing more than curios carried around by geeks.
Now, with smartphones replacing laptops as the primary Internet device for consumers, there’s a gap in the market for apps designed to make buying and selling on the mobile phones easy.
That’s where ShopSpot comes in. It is a mobile marketplace that promises to make shopping as simple as tweeting. The iOS app, which is now available for download, is developed by Thai national Natsakon Kiatsuranon and team. They are incubatees at the JFDI-Innov8 Bootcamp in Singapore. Read more
If this report by Willis Wee from TechinAsia is true, Zalora is in bad shape, and the feared Oliver Samwer visited Singapore two days ago for a marathon eight-hour “motivational talk”.
These allegations are false, claims Tan Wee, managing director and co-founder of Zalora Singapore, an online fashion retailer owned by the infamous Rocket Internet. He denies the article’s suggestion that “the meeting is probably triggered by complaints Zalora has received from its customers so far.”
In fact, Tan Wee reports that his German boss was in fact quite happy with progress.
“The exact conversation he had with me was: ‘Tan Wee, good job, things are going well,’” he says. The visit was in fact a routine one, and this was the third time they had met in Singapore.
Since Zalora launched in Singapore and Malaysia, it has received a lot of complaints about slow delivery times on its Facebook Pages. Some items were not received even after two weeks.
While he acknowledges that many of the feedback are valid, and that they’re learning, Tan Wee questions if a few Facebook comments are enough to paint an accurate picture of Zalora’s health. Read more
