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
This is the fourth article from the “Mistakes made, lessons learnt” series. Check out all the articles here.
Company & founder: Gina Romero
Biggest mistake made: Failing ask for help from others when confronted with an unexpected big offer
Most memorable setback: Missing out on a potentially big deal – to be the main wireless Internet infrastructure supplier for a housing estate. Read more
In the restaurant-eat-restaurant world of the F&B industry, few local brands have stood out as clearly as Crystal Jade, one of the market leaders in Singapore. Celebrating its 20th anniversary last year with a refreshing of its identity that involves extensive refurbishments at its restaurants, Crystal Jade enjoyed a turnover of S$240M (US$189M) in 2010.
Over the last three years, it has expanded aggressively, investing S$25M (together with partners) to open 39 new outlets across Asia. This year, the F&B group will sink in a further S$17M to open 17 new outlets across eight cities. These efforts helped it to achieve a targeted 10 percent to 15 percent yearly growth in sales.
Beginning from a single outlet in Cairnhill in 1991 — which was closed and reopened with a Kitchen outlet in Shaw Plaza and a Palace outlet in Ngee Ann City – the group now has more than 100 outlets sprawled across 18 cities in nine countries. Half of these are in Singapore while the other 50 are in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and more. Read more
For Singaporean Lawrence Koh (photo, right), no dream is so big that it can’t be achieved. Consider this: As the founder and managing director of iFly Singapore, he started the largest indoor skydiving facility in the world — at five meters wide and five storeys in height. It’s also the first in Singapore.
His business the fulfillment of his dream to gift the experience of flight to everyone, and while it’s arguable that commercial flight has achieved that, nothing beats the thrill of jumping off an airplane.
But the cost of skydiving is still prohibitive — it can run up to $400 per jump. So Lawrence did the next best thing: Set up a towering, state-of-the-art wind tunnel in Sentosa. iFly Singapore officially launched in May 2011 to much media fanfare. Read more
For those of you who have been following the tech startup scene closely, you would have heard of Arnon Kohavi, an Israeli investor who tried but failed to set up a venture capital firm in Chile. As a result, he shifted his new fund, Yarden VC, to Singapore.
Writing to US tech blog TheNextWeb, he talked about the reasons why he left the Latin American country after six months, and highlighted the many drawbacks of the startup environment over there. This was after he proclaimed that “the next Skype, Facebook or MercadoLibre will have to come out of Chile.”
The interview sparked off an intense debate.
A Start-Up Chile participant wrote in to TheNextWeb to express disappointment at Arnon, questioning his commitment to Latin America. Sarah Lacy, formerly a columnist at TechCrunch, went even further, suggesting that Arnon is a fraud.
“Arnon Kohavi. Remember that name, don’t give him money and don’t let him invest in your startup,” she warned in her acerbic article. Read more
Carol hails from Taiwan(left) while Maria (right) is from Hong Kong.
Carol Chyau and Maria So started social enterprise Shokay long before the term became a buzzword in recent years.
Shokay, which is the Tibetan word for yak, is a lifestyle brand that designs stylish products made from soft yak down. By sourcing from Tibetan herders in Qinghai and employing women in rural areas, it helps promote sustainable income in rural China.
Shokay’s work allows indigenous herders to generate more direct income, preserve local culture, promote sustainable usage of the environment and promote community development work.
Carol was in Singapore the past November for TEDxKRP to share her experience.
From inspiration to execution
While doing their Masters in Public Administration at Harvard, the duo decided to put the business concepts they learnt into action. The pair went seeking for inspiration on two weeklong trips in Yunnan, China in January 2006. Read more
Long ago on television, a certain Captain Planet rescued our planet by defeating eco-terrorists with his superpowers. In real life, saving the earth requires much more patience.
For Singapore entrepreneur Alan Yeap, he’s doing it by painstakingly building a company from the ground up and making it profitable. He started New Quantum Holdings in 2010, which is in the business of — among other things — developing and selling oxo-degradable and biodegradable plastic bags.
Alan doesn’t have the flamboyance of Captain Planet or environmental activist Al Gore. Quite the opposite. He’s mild-mannered and soft-spoken, but calm and self-confident. He knows plastics well — prior to starting the company, he was in the plastic trading and distribution business in an MNC for 20 years. Read more
Fearless is a word often used to describe Karen Kerrigan, a think tank member of the World Entrepreneurship Forum, and it’s not difficult to see why.
Deciding that entrepreneurs weren’t getting the attention they deserved from government bodies, she founded the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE) in the US, ruffling more than a few establishment feathers in the process.
Started in 1994, the SBE is a research and advocacy organization dedicated to help small business owners and promote entrepreneurship.
Today, the think tank has more than 70,000 members and she is one of the most influential voices in Congress, having led several key initiatives to improve business conditions for entrepreneurs and foster US and global entrepreneurship. Read more
Let’s face it: In the globalized and fast-changing world we’re living in today, speaking more than one language helps. Even better if you’re fluent in the language of the world’s second largest economy – Mandarin.
Lelia is the mother of two highly active and inquisitive kids. Despite her Chinese roots, Lelia realized that her handicap of being brought up solely on a diet of Western education would not help in raising her children to become bilingual.
Because of that, she decided to start a project that had absolutely nothing to do with her twenty years of corporate experience in large MNCs, doing human resource and recruitment.
Lelia created her first DVD in October 2010 to teach Mandarin to her children. Read more
This article is syndicated from MoneySmart, an online finance publication for the masses.
Reizo is a custom tailoring house, located at Wilkie Edge. Just a few years old, they already have a faithful following by delivering quality at affordable prices. REIZO’s custom suits suggest a wine-sniffing, caviar-munching elegance, which sets you a head above your less dressed colleagues.
At the helm of Reizo is young entrepreneur Vishnu Vasudeven. Graduating from NUS with a major in finance, he gave up a comfy bank job to create Reizo. In his own words:
“I wanted to do something different. I tried internships (at the bank) and didn’t like it. I wanted to start my own thing.” Read more
