Deal.com.sg starts its own food delivery site, challenges Rocket Internet’s Food Panda

Just days after the mighty Rocket Internet launched their online food delivery service Food Panda in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s second largest daily deals site Deal.com.sg unveiled their very own competitor today —  DEALivery.sg.

Both websites now join HungryDelivery.com and EatIt.sg in an increasingly competitive food fight — a boon for consumers.

Rocket Internet is a German technology incubator that has been aggressively expanding to Southeast Asia in a variety of online verticals: Fashion store Zalora, Amazon-like website Lazada, and a Pinterest-clone called Pinspire.

Read more

Best places for social entrepreneurs: Singapore, Silicon Valley, London

The best place for social entrepreneurship?

“Where’s the best place in the world for a social entrepreneur to live and build a social enterprise?”

That’s a tough question. It appears there are two schools of thought when it comes to attempting an answer: Get close or go big.

Some people believe that a social entrepreneur should be physically near to her target market. If she is working on poverty alleviation, then perhaps she should be in a city like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Or if she is fighting air or water pollution then perhaps Dhaka, Bangladesh. That certainly makes sense for a number of social entrepreneurs.

But then there are those of us who think that a social enterprise with the greatest potential for global impact requires a very specific type of climate to flourish. In my research, I’ve identified a few factors that deeply matter: Access to talent, access to funding, access to markets, a good business climate, and a supportive culture. From that perspective, highly developed cities rise to the top. Read more

Are the Samwer Brothers, a.k.a Rocket Internet really that bad for Southeast Asia?

Many months back, I tweeted about the entrance of Rocket Internet in Southeast Asia with the comment, “Winter is coming.” Not long after, they have gotten off the ground running with an aggressive hiring spree and clones in the e-commerce space.

Rocket Internet is a company that belongs to the Samwer Brothers. They are known for their amazing execution prowess and their ruthlessness in cloning successful US Internet companies. Of course, their tactics and methods have raised the ire of many, including pro-Silicon Valley reporters such as Sarah Lacy who mounted a campaign against them.

But is the company’s impact on the Southeast Asia digital market all bad? I’ll examine this issue in detail and argue that while it may have some impact on innovation, it isn’t bad for the industry as a whole. Read more

Foodpanda, Rocket Internet’s online food delivery service, debuts in Southeast Asia

Hot on the heels of the launch of Amazon-like website Lazada in Southeast Asia, Rocket Internet has today unveiled another one of its new ventures: An online food delivery service called Foodpanda, which is headquartered in Singapore but also available in Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Read more

Interview with Guyi Shen: How LobangClub got 38k users, and more

For those who’ve been following the startup scene lately, it’s hard to miss Guyi Shen, co-founder of Singapore-based LobangClub, a price comparison app.

He was a supposed “victim” on the Dragon Den-like reality show Angel’s Gate, where the angels offered him a year’s worth of mentorship in exchange for ten percent equity — a proposition many find ridiculous (read his side of the story).

But more than that, his app has gained quite a decent amount of traction in Singapore, at 38,000 active users in a city of five million since its launch in September 2011. His challenge now is to expand to the region and generate enough revenue to sustain his business.

We caught up with him recently via email to see how’s he doing. Read more

5 common myths successful CEOs like to tell you

Whether it’s in an interview in the trade magazines, in the college newspaper or on TV, CEOs of successful businesses like to paint a picture that belies the truth.

In some cases, it’s a romantic veneer over how hard they work, or how calculated they go about their management and this exists in part because the public wants an easily-digestible story of how to achieve results, or that it generally makes for a good uplifting reading.

Nobody likes to read a story of a struggle that includes constant repetition, problem-solving, manufacturing defects and late deliveries — it’s just “boring”. Read: Can’t sell newspapers or fill a business school auditorium.

The reality of it is much harsher yet simpler.

Read on for five common myths you’ll come across in interviews from successful CEOs (which you have to take with a generous pinch of salt): Read more

Hoiio working on its own version of Facebook Connect

Chances are, if you own a smartphone, you would know Facebook Connect. You may not know its name, but you’ve definitely used it. It’s essentially a service that allows you to bring your Facebook identity into other apps or websites.

For example, if you download Scramble with Friends, you can play the game using your Facebook identity, and even find out which of your Facebook friends are also playing the game so that you can compete with them.

Well, it turns out Singapore-based Hoiio is working on a similar idea for its suite of mobile apps, except that it’s called Hoiio Connect, revealed co-founder Junda Ong.

But while Facebook is motivated by the desire to get Internet users perpetually connected to its social network, Hoiio wants to get people hooked onto its communication services. Read more

Great Startup Weekend Singapore, but…

With three hours left, Shopperholly scrambles to finish their prototype and prepare their presentation. Photo: Startup Weekend Singapore 2012

I dropped by at Startup Weekend Singapore on Sunday for the first time, not knowing what to expect.

But I’m glad to report that my experience was positive. For those who are new to the startup scene, Startup Weekend is a global series of events that brings random people together to develop a startup idea into a minimum viable product within 54 hours.

The event ends with a scintillating (or discombobulating) series of pitches, where the teams get feedback from a panel consisting of investors and established entrepreneurs. Read more

Why Flocations turned down a quarter of a million from Angel’s Gate judges

If you’ve caught tonight’s episode of Angel’s Gate, you would know that Flocations, a Singapore-based startup, turned down a quarter of a million dollars from the judges. Their main reason? The cash was insufficient given the terms offered.

“We’ve worked on our company for almost a year, spending hours agonizing over the numbers and producing the best code. Why would we only take 15 seconds to make a decision that signs away a third of our company?” Read more

16-year-old tech prodigy Nick D’Aloisio visits Singapore, new app in the works

Nick hanging out with SGE at Starbucks. Photo: Rusydi

Nick D’Aloisio is a 16-year-old technology prodigy.

But like any ordinary teenager from London, he enjoys rugby and cricket, doesn’t get baseball, and relishes playing sports with his friends on weekends. He loves attending school as well, possessing a deep interest in learning and wishes to do philosophy in university someday.

“I also kinda miss the environment of being in a classroom, like you know, the whole thing?” he says, as we hang out in Starbucks. He orders orange juice while I settle for a cup of cappuccino.

Here in Singapore for a few days with his investment banker dad, he was previously in Japan, where he met up with Nobuyuki Idei, the former Chairman and CEO of Sony. In Singapore, he scheduled meetings with Google, Ubisoft, and other major tech firms, as well as investors and entrepreneurs.

Nick, who grew up in Australia but now lives in London, has not been in school for four weeks, as he was exempted by the British government from attending classes. But he does plan to go back in September, once he has his company “pretty set up and self-sustaining”.

His startup is Summly, now making waves in the tech scene and drawing press coverage from major news outlets. He is quite likely the youngest individual ever, at 15 years old, to get seed funding for his venture, at reportedly over US$250k. His backer is Horizons Ventures, the venture capital firm of Li Ka-Shing, a Chinese billionaire and the 11th richest man in the world.

Nick’s iOS app (downloadable here) has just crossed the 150,000 download mark. Read more