Squiryl seeks to do for loyalty cards what Google did for ads

Loyalty cards are inefficient and generate a lot of waste. Even digital ones. A while ago, I was at a music shop and decided to preorder a music album for a friend.

To my delight, I received two chops on Perx, a loyalty card app I recently featured. But to my dismay, I was eight chops away from getting my reward. And it’s extremely unlikely I’ll step into the store ever again — I’m just not an avid music listener.

Here’s the problem with loyalty cards: They don’t always capture loyal customers. And when they don’t, they’re a burden to merchants.

This is a problem Singapore-based startup Squiryl hopes to solve. Unlike other loyalty card apps, it allows users to swap stamps — or acorns, in their lingo — with one another.

Suppose I have two acorns at a restaurant I’ll never visit again. I can use the Trades feature to exchange acorns with others by putting up an offer. For example, I can offer two acorns from Fisherios Fish n Chips in exchange for three acorns at a Puma store. Read more

While his friends partied, this entrepreneur slogged to build a global racing company

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

Eat this, tech purists: Aunty Binnaz reads fortunes from coffee cups, makes a killing

Technology startups are today’s entrepreneurial rockstars. Not a week goes by without an announcement of a new location-based app, niche social network, or online travel discovery service.

But like many hard-luck musicians, these startups burn bright at the beginning, relying on the quick fix of seed or venture funding, only to fade later on.

That’s because they are still searching for a business model, and until then, they can’t be legitimately called a sustainable business.

In the midst of this fever, Aunty Binnaz is an online service that stands out for modernizing an un-sexy industry — fortune-telling. Yes, I’m talking about psychic reading of the tarot-card, astrology sort.

Except in this case, Aunty Binnaz’s main product is coffee-cup reading, a popular form of fortune telling in Turkey. Read more

Why Chumby failed: Hardware, Apple, and the state of denial

By now, Chumby’s demise is well known among fans and tech enthusiasts alike. The US company was most well known for its Chumby devices, which are intelligent, Internet-connected versions of otherwise dumb objects. However, it fell by the wayside soon after Apple changed the consumer electronics industry with the iPhone and the iPad.

In reaction, Chumby pivoted to producing a software platform for smart TVs, but that didn’t work out either. Their journey ended officially in late April. Andrew “bunnie” Huang, or just bunnie as he is often called, had front row seats to the San Diego company’s fall. He was serving as its co-founder and vice-president for hardware engineering.

Recently, we visited the Singapore-based entrepreneur for an interview, revealing some interesting insights about the inner workings of Chumby. Read more

Perx dumped daily deals business to focus on loyalty card app, has no regrets

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

Chalkboard calls it quits after going to Silicon Valley

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

Horizon wants to power every home with fuel cells

This electric car from London uses Horizon's fuel cells.

We just love hearing stories of regional startups that’ve made it big internationally. Southeast Asian companies like Charles & Keith, Banyan Tree Holdings and 77th Street have held the limelight in recent years and are still going strong.

Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies, a Singapore company dealing with ultra-light and low-cost energy storage solutions, is right up there with the best of them.

Making hydrogen fuel cells, which are essentially long lasting power generators that generate electricity from gas, has been a global challenge for decades now and this was where Horizon decided to step in and make fuel cell their main focus.

That was in 2004. Eight years on, they are now the world’s largest producers of micro-fuel cells in consumer and industrial applications. It has successfully brought a wide range of products out into the market, with sales spanning 65 countries in total.

We spoke to Taras Wankewycz, Executive Director and one of the co-founders of this green technology company, on its success formula and what it takes to be on top of their game. Read more

[VIDEO] Marc Co-founder of Tudou advises foreign entrepreneurs entering Asia

So, a few videos interviews I did at DEMO Asia 2012 two weeks ago mysteriously disappeared and now have reappeared on my (i)phone. This short interview with Marc van der Chijs, Dutch founder of Chinese video-sharing site, Tudou, is thus a bit delayed but nevertheless still relevant.

In here, he talks about the diversity of ideas but yet how some of the companies he saw at DEMO Asia — a launchpad for emerging technology – had small visions, but “it’s okay, you can start with a small vision but still build it up to a bigger company eventually”.

Watch out also for his advice to foreign entrepreneurs trying to enter Asia. 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

Indonesia’s Jamu Queen: Journey of a princess turned entrepreneur

Photo: Dr Mooryati Soedibyo's private collection

The garage has long been the birthplace of many great companies — Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, to name a few. Even Walt Disney got his start producing his first animated series, “The Alice Comedies” in his uncle’s garage before forming his own studio.

Closer to home, the humble garage also witnessed the birth of PT Mustika Ratu, Indonesia’s famed herbal medicine (or jamu) brand, in the early seventies.

The business caused many to raise their eyebrows, because not only was the person behind it a woman, she was also a direct descendant of the royal Javanese family, one who was actually raised within the walls of a kraton (Javanese palace).

It was unheard of for someone of her status to work, let alone start a business and as Dr BRA. [1] Mooryati Soedibyo readily admits, the reaction from her family was far from encouraging. “Initially, my family did not support my decision to become a business woman as it was against our ancient traditions,” she recalls.

“Only through my own determination and hard work was I able to persevere and overcome this challenge, which actually helped motivate me to become successful on my own.” Read more