RIP Billy Mays (1958 to 2009)

Remember those As-Seen-On-TV infomercials selling the most incredible products? Like that magical cleaning squirt that will make your whites whiter, and your brights brighter? Or that compact gym equipment that promises you washboard abs in six weeks, flat?

Now, entrepreneurs, you have a chance to become the next great TV salesman, like the amazing Billy Mays. In this special, limited time offer, MediaCorp, Singapore’s number one (and only) broadcaster, is giving you the chance to sell your products to thousands of people!

We’re talking about an incredible new TV series on Channel U and xinmsn, The Potential.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve imported the product or invented it. You can pitch on the show and charm audiences with your suave smile and smooth delivery. You could be a blogshop owner, a performer with tickets, or a small business owner. All can apply. Deadline is 9th January.

While watching the show, viewers can instantly buy your products from Mocca, MediaCorp’s incredible platform for classifieds and directory advertising in Singapore. And the best part is, YOU keep all the earnings!

What an incredible, life-changing opportunity!

Thousands of Singaporean commuters taking the train at the Bugis and Boon Lay MRT stations will be in for a Christmas surprise: They can purchase now groceries by scanning QR codes with their smartphones.

The squarish bar codes are placed next to pictures of the items, which are on a wall. Commuters will then be brought to the Cold Storage website, where they can key in their details and get the Christmas ham delivered to their homes. It’s an interesting integration of mobile commerce and ambient marketing.

Dawn Loh, managing director of SMRT Investments, told Channel NewsAsia: “A lot of commuters are always time-starved. Sometimes, they may not have time to do grocery shopping. Online shopping is a way to go now, so with a virtual store now on the public transport network which is very pervasive, we hope that the commuters can take onto this very quickly and more will come on board.”

This initiative started on 7th December and will last till 20th December.

However, Lee Xian Jie, a 22-year-old entrepreneur who passed by Bugis MRT, felt the implementation could have been better.

“The location the advertiser chose was outside the station, and the high traffic does not allow people to stop and snap, as they would wish. If the ads were in the platform area, on the sliding glass doors, people would pay more attention since they would be literally sitting around waiting,” he said.

Singapore is not the first country to have done this. In South Korea, supermarket chain Tesco did something similar in a subway station. Said an Adverblog report: “Online sales between November 2010 and January 2011 increased by 130 percent, with the number of registered members rising by 76 percent.”

2011 has turned out to be the year where QR codes have entered mainstream Singapore and many other parts of the world. Step out of the train at City Hall MRT, and you’ll see a huge poster of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie with a QR code that brings you to the movie trailer.

Even our political scene has seen some QR code action, with current President Tony Tan using them on his campaign posters during the Presidential election in August.

I can’t vouch for the effectiveness of how these mobile barcodes are used though, but I expect that as marketers get used to this tool, they’ll become better at it.

Image: Screengrabs from Channel NewsAsia video clip

A global study by market research company TNS Global has found that 43 percent of Singaporeans don’t wish to engage with brands on social media networks, against an average of 57 percent in developed markets.

This signals a need for brands to adopt a more targeted approach in their social media outreach, or otherwise risk wasting their efforts and contributing to digital media waste.

The findings were announced on 11th November following a study which involved 72,000 consumers in 60 studies. More results can be found on the TNS Digital Life website.

“Winning and retaining customers is harder than ever,” said Arnaud Frade, Regional Director Digital Strategy, TNS APAC.

“Whilst there are obvious and very significant opportunities for brands online, success will only come from a deliberate strategy, considered tactics and careful tailoring aligned to a market, a channel, a category or even a group of individuals. Getting this wrong and adding to the cacophony of noise in the online world risks alienating potential customers and impacting business growth.”

He adds that the goal of companies should be to connect in an authentic manner with their target audience by understanding them intimately. “Selecting the right online approach and focusing on efficient messaging are critical,” he said.

Other findings from the survey:

• Fast growth markets are more open to brands on social networks. 73 percent of Vietnamese and 69 percent of Indonesians think social networks are good places to learn about brands, compared to 50 percent in South Korea and 62 percent in Singapore.
• Across the board, 40 percent of Asian Internet users don’t want to be bothered by brands on social networks, “revealing that Asians would rather initiate contact with brands than have brands approach them.”
• Although 45 percent of Singaporeans post comments on company pages to impart advice, 76 percent do so for the more self-serving purpose of engaging a promotion or special offer.
• While common wisdom dictates that people tend to complain about bad service more than they praise good ones, this survey challenges that assumption. Globally, 13 percent have written praise, while 11 percent have written complaints. These figures hold true for Singapore. Thais are also found to be the most likely to praise (22 percent), while the Japanese complain the least (7 percent).
• Consumers in fast growth markets are eager to spend more time and money online than they do now, although infrastructure challenges remain a problem for online brand engagement. Internet costs remain a major obstacle for Malaysians, Indonesians, and Thai users.
• 48 percent of consumers in fast growth markets are open to buying products from within social networks, compared to a quarter in developed countries. Singaporeans comes in at 41 percent, making them the most eager among developed markets in Asia Pacific.
• Asian consumers are the early adopters of group buying and m-commerce (also see this study on smartphone usage).  46 percent of people in China and 33 percent of Singaporeans have adopted group buying, while the adoption rate in Sweden and Finland is only 6 percent.

Image: Full interactive version at TNS Digital Life

On the Spotify website, job postings for a Label Relations Director, Business Controller, Business Developer Director, Regional HR Manager, and Business Developer Manager for the two cities have been put up.

Following its US$100M funding round in June, it has entered into a phase of rapid global expansion. Spotify is expected to launch in Belgium, Austria and Switzerland as early as this week.

In addition to Singapore and Hong Kong, the company is also reportedly setting its sights on Germany, New Zealand, and Australia.

Right now, the service is only available in eight countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, the US, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

Spotify is perceived to have leapfrogged their rivals after their partnership with Facebook, which makes having a Facebook account a requirement for new Spotify users.

About 250,000 new users a day have joined the service ever since the partnership which enabled Spotify users to notify their Facebook friends about the songs they’re listening to at any given moment.

Its competitors are not sitting still though. Rdio, We7, Deezer, Rhapsody, and Pandora are also either expanding or mulling an expansion to other countries.

The finalists from the region will automatically enter the TR35 Global competition. They will also be showcased at the Emtech@Singapore conference, which will be held in January 2012.

TR35 Global was established in 1999 as the TR100, and they accept entries from a wide range of fields, which include biotechnology, materials, computer hardware, energy, transportation, and the Internet.

Winners of TR35 Global will be featured on the September/October issue of Technology Review and on the website. They will also receive recognition at the next Emtech MIT conference in October 2012.

Past winners have included Jonathan Ive of Apple Computer (1999), Sergey Brin of Google (2002), and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (2007).

Nominees for TR35@Singapore must be under 35 as of 1st October, 2012. A one year allowance can be made for women who have given birth to one child or more.

To nominate someone for the Award, click here. Deadline is 31st October. But do read the FAQ before you fill up the form.

That’s the Singapore version of the largest video-sharing site in the world, which launched today (20th October). This new website promises to give Singapore viewers more relevant local content, which also means more exposure for local content creators.

If you’re not able to see the Singapore site for some reason, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Singapore”, or visit YouTube.com.sg directly.

YouTube has also announced a licensing agreement with the Composers & Authors Society of Singapore and the launch of the YouTube Partner Program, which allows all Singapore-based video creaters — musicians, singers, short firm makers, and so on — to earn advertising revenue through the site.

So far, there are 35 localized YouTube sites worldwide. Singapore follows the Philippines as the second country in Southeast Asia with a localized site.

To usher in YouTube’s new baby, a video featuring many local celebrities has been created. They include: Mr Brown, Hossan Leong, Xiaxue, Chua En Lai, and Nat Ho. Popular Filipino singer Charice Pempengo also sent her greetings.

If you’re a big fan of shows like Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank where venture capitalists gobble up clueless entrepreneurs on TV, then you’ll love this one.

Angel’s Gate, Asia’s very own version of such entrepreneur programs, is set to air next Monday (6th February) on Channel NewsAsia at 8pm Singapore time. Ash Singh, founder and CEO of InteractiveSG, which produced the show, revealed that the judges have offered a deal of as much as half-a-million on the program.

No reality show is complete without auditions. For Angel’s Gate, the auditions come in the form of elevator pitches. Quite literally, entrepreneurs enter an elevator where an angel investor stands waiting, and they have only 30 seconds to impress or go home.

One such entrepreneur who passed the test is Chee Yen Lim, CEO of Micropoint Technologies. His product is a drug delivery needle so small that it’s invokes no pain when pressed on a person’s skin. He made the ultimate sacrifice — by demonstrating it on himself.

Chee is appearing on the first episode of the show.

Another entrepreneur that will make an appearance is John Fearon, founder of DropMySite.com (see product feature), the audition was a true Mother-of-God, nerve-wrecking experience. He told me that his mind was a total blank when he went into the elevator, and he had to rely on his countless rehearsals to get the pitch done.

“The cameras in the elevator made it a different experience,” he said.

The Angel’s Gate judges are not half-past six investors who are just out to make a quick buck — they’re the real deal.

They include the likes of William Klippgen, founder of Tigris Capital; Patrick Grove, ranked one of Asia’s best young entrepreneurs; branding and marketing guru Ken Mandel; and Karan Singh Thakral, a veteran entrepreneur in consumer electronics.

They’re all decked in spiffy white suits — in keeping with the show’s name, but don’t be fooled into thinking that they’ll always be nice and smiley. This is a reality show after all, and the judges are there not just to dispense wisdom, but also to entertain and provoke.

And see which entrepreneur has guts and resolve.

Philippa Lett, the British-accented host of the show, promised that we can expect “more than one Simon Cowell on the program.”

I’m hoping for some fireworks.

From the looks of it, there’s no rehearsed bullshit on the show (aside from the entrepreneur’s pitches) — the investors came in with their eyes wide open and learnt how to judge on the fly.

“We never sat down together before… we just came into the studio and started shooting. Which makes even better reality TV,” said Grove.

While the show’s format is familiar, there are some important innovations too. Ash said that Angel’s Gate is taking a 360 degrees approach. Besides television, the show will come to life on both the web and mobile.

Viewers can expect a total of eight TV episodes, as well as 30 webisodes, which will be made available on YouTube.

Another innovation was that entrepreneurs had to sign up on the website, which was launched last October, to canvass for votes and source for crowd-funding, which works on an all-or-nothing system. They can even seek team members online.

The most popular entries then appear on the show, where they’ll to pitch to the Angels, who’ll decide on the spot if they should receive an investment from the AngelFund, which is contributed by a mix of high net-worth individuals and venture capitalists. One of the firms involved is Crystal Horse Investments.

Entrepreneurs that got rejected could refine their business idea and resubmit it through the website.

Investment decisions were made on a majority basis. Meaning, if three of the judges like the business idea but one investor strongly hates it, that one judge is overruled.

So far, about 30 percent of participants are Singaporeans, another 30 percent are PRs and expats in Singapore, with the remaining coming from the rest of the world.

“There’s even one guy from Dallas, Texas,” said Ash at the launch event last year.

Where ever the participants are from, I’m sure the judges and viewers are looking forward to brilliant pitches that will set the screen on fire.

This Singapore-made show, perhaps, signals how perceptions towards entrepreneurship has changed in the last decade in the island state.

Said Grove: “As an entrepreneur who started out in Singapore 12 years ago, back then, being an entrepreneur is a taboo subject, it was not a career option that your parents would be proud to say that you have chosen. But today, it’s so exciting and people are mobilizing to support the show and I’m really proud to be a part of it.”

Catch the trailer for Angel’s Gate here.

It allows you to bookmark videos from a variety of sources and watch it later, whether you’re online or offline (useful if you’re an older dude and a Justin Bieber fan, and you don’t want your colleagues to know).

There are two ways to use the app. You could be surfing the Internet when you stumble across a video you’d like to watch later. Using a bookmarklet obtainable from getdenso.com, you can bookmark the video and it will sync with both the web app and mobile app.

Or, you can access the app itself and stream videos either from your friend feeds on Facebook and Twitter, or from a variety of channels containing content from popular sources like TED, College Humor, and many more.

The mobile app has one additional feature that the web app doesn’t have: You can download videos directly to your iPhone, iPad, or Android device, and watch it when you’re offline. YouTube videos, however, cannot be downloaded due to their terms of service.

Basically, Denso combines the functionalities of Flipboard and Instapaper, two popular apps for reading online articles, and applies it to video.

The iPad version of the app really stands out for me. Upon starting it up, you’ll be brought to a beautiful, minimalist grid interface that’s somewhat reminiscent of Windows Phone 7′s Metro UI.

Similar apps to Denso that exist in the market right now include Wacchen and Watchlater, although they’re not as full-featured. Wacchen only has a web app, and both services lack Flipboard-like capability. Which makes Denso pretty unique.

Denso is the second app Anideo has released to the public so far. The first is Fotobook, which allows users to view and save your friend’s Facebook photos.

The company is run by AJ Solimine, Arun Thampi and Kent Nguyen.

This is according to an international study done by Experian Hitwise, a global information services company, which surveyed a grand total of eight countries. Besides Facebook data, the study also surveyed social media usage in general.

Coming in second is New Zealand, which averaged around half an hour, while Australians are third, hitting 26 minutes and 27 seconds. The next best Asian country is India, at around 20 minutes, or seventh place.

None of the other Asian countries with high Internet penetration rates, like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, were studied.

The finding that Singaporeans are world-beating marathoners in social media should come as no surprise. A joint study by Google and Ipsos showed that Singaporeans are the most prolific mobile social networkers among 30 countries.

On a per-capita basis, Singaporeans are very adept at using Twitter, beaten only by the Americans.

They are not a lone island when it comes to social media usage, of course. In general, countries in the Asia Pacific region have been found to connect with others online quite extensively.

ViKi, an international video site which mobilizes its community to translate programs into more than a hundred languages, has raised around US$20 million in series B funding.

This round’s investors include Neoteny Labs, SK Planet, a subsidiary of SK Telecom, BBC Worldwide, Greylock Partners, Andreesen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and others.

Prior to this, ViKi has raised a Series A funding of US$4.3 million from the same sources, save for SK Planet and BBC Worldwide, which are new investors.

Currently, translations to more than 150 languages have been done — including Klingon. The website has over 30 popular TV series from the BBC under its belt, including Hotel Babylon and Mistresses. They have also announced a deal with NBC Universal and A+E Networks International, which follows a month later from their signing of major syndication deals with BBC and Netflix.

Some of the recently introduced content include: City Hunter and Lie to Me on from Netflix, and a new Chinese drama and Indonesian horror film from Hulu.

ViKi’s user base has been expanding greatly in the past year. Now, they recently registered about 8.5 million unique visitors and 36 million visits in one month, which is four times the traffic from last year.

Their Facebook Page has also seen a massive boost in ‘likes’ within a short span of time, from 700,000 in Augest to close to 1.5 million now. They are believed to be the first Singapore-based company to do so.

According to Nadine Yap, the vice-president of product, ViKi has gone on a multi-faceted drive to increase its user base. That includes procuring more content from a dozen countries, syndicating movies and entertainment news, implementing Facebook Share on their site and starting Facebook programming, partnership distribution with Yahoo! Southeast Asia and Singapore’s InSing, community outreach through social media, and search engine optimization.

Mobile is another area they want to hop on to, and they’ve recently launched an iPhone app. They have partnered with Samsung to produce an Android app.

Much of ViKi’s operations are conducted in Singapore. They have a smaller Korea office as well, as well as employees in Japan and San Francisco.