Hot on the heels of Reserveit.sg, a rival online restaurant reservation website in Singapore called Chope.com.sg has launched their own iPhone app.
It allows users to browse a list of restaurants, find out details like location, opening hours, and cuisine, and then reserve a table. The app was designed and developed by Burpple, a mobile social food journal that launched a few weeks ago.
It’s interesting that Burpple and Chope describe themselves as “mobile strategic partners”, and I believe we can expect more manifestations of the partnership to unveil in time to come. Read more
While adults have a multitude of ways to find information these days using Google, Wikipedia, Siri, and many other new-fangled services, kids are left out in the loop.
They are still stuck with asking their parents about such questions as “Why is the earth round?” and “What are dinosaurs?”
And here’s the reason why: Much of the Internet isn’t designed with young kids in mind. Many websites and apps have interfaces that are too complex, require advanced language skills to navigate, and they overwhelm children with too much information.
This is where Ask Wildby comes in. It is a mobile encyclopedia app that is specifically designed for kids four to seven years old. Children can speak a word into the app, after which they will be brought to a page with a slideshow and a voice narration. Read more
Filed under Innovation & Technology, Mobile, Technology, WebTags: ask wildby, children's apps, education apps, educational apps, jfdi, jfdi-innov8 2012 bootcamp, JFDI.asia, Singapore, wildby
ShopSpot, the Singapore-based incubatee of the JFDI-Innov8 2012 Bootcamp, has annouced today that they have received funding of an undisclosed amount from a group of angels and entrepreneurs in Thailand, led by Kris Nalamlieng.
The company received the investment in the midst of the 100-day inaugural bootcamp. ShopSpot aims to make “selling stuff as easy as sending a tweet” (see SGE’s app feature). Since launch, they have garnered over 1,500 downloads on the iOS. Within 12 hours, the app reached number five in its category on iTunes.
“The cash element of this investment will allow us to focus on shaping the great user experience that will make ShopSpot a leading force in mobile commerce worldwide,” said Natsakon Kiatsuranon, co-founder and CEO of ShopSpot. Read more
Kark Mobile Education, an incubatee at Singapore’s first ever JFDI-Innov8 Bootcamp, announced that they have received funding of an undisclosed sum from Ideosource, a Jakarta-based investment firm.
The startup, started by four Indonesians, is developing a series of education collectible card games that interact with companion mobile apps. The edutainment platform is targeted at kids 5-12 years old (see SGE’s feature of Kark).
The funding will go towards the development of those products.
“We are delighted to have this support, which gives us the ability to continue building our product after the bootcamp and reinforces what we have believed all along– that games have a great future in the educational industry,” says Bullitt Sesariza, founder and CTO of Kark. Read more
Filed under Funding, Innovation & Technology, Mobile, News Stop, TechnologyTags: andi surja boediman, bullitt sezaria, jfdi, jfdi-innov8 2012 bootcamp, JFDI.asia, kark, kark mobile education, Wong Meng Weng
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
Mobile advertising has taken on a whole new level with Amobee, mobile ad platform company responsible for defining mobile advertising, announcing an exclusive partnership with AccuWeather, the world’s leading multimedia weather information source.
A division of SingTel’s Digital L!fe Group which focuses on creating new digital growth engines, Amobee offers comprehensive, end-to-end mobile advertising solutions and services for advertisers, publishers and operators worldwide while AccuWeather on the other hand, is an innovator in mobile advertising by making its mobile inventory, mobile applications and mobile web highly contextual by providing over 100 weather, lifestyle and location attributes for advertisers to choose from.
With its US$321 million acquisition of Amobee last month, SingTel has set its sights on expanding into the mobile marketing arena, especially in the area of one-to-one connections between brands and consumers. Read more
I remember the time, over a decade ago, when Magic: The Gathering trading cards were the rage. Boys would play them below apartment blocks and on hidden corners of shopping malls.
They’re so addictive that my school would punish any student caught playing them while in school uniform. Newspapers sensationalized about the evils of these collectible cards, much like they do now with World of Warcraft.
While I think much of this negative hype towards games are overblown, Kark, one of twelve incubatees at Singapore’s JFDI-Innov8 Bootcamp, is taking the message seriously and has embarked on a mission to make games less harmful to kids. They’re achieving this by making educational trading cards that interact with smartphones through companion mobile apps.
“Children love games, but they don’t benefit. Only developers do,” says CEO and serial entrepreneur Sindhu Prabowo Dilaksono, who heads a team of four Indonesian co-founders.
“Doing educational apps is one way of making money without feeling guilty.” Read more
Filed under Entrepreneurs, Innovation & Technology, Mobile, Retail, TechnologyTags: bullit sesariza, daniel simon, fithor faris, indonesia, jakarta, jfdi, jfdi-innov8 2012 bootcamp, JFDI.asia, kark, sundhu prabowo dilaksono
Don't get the reference? Ask around.
Recently, Singaporeans have been getting hot and bothered by the rapid succession of train breakdowns on their once faultless Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT) system.
Ever since the two major disruptions last year, which has led to the resignation of SMRT CEO Saw Phaik Hwa, the problems have not ceased. In fact, it has almost become a way of life for commuters.
Now, there’s even an iPhone app, called Mana Rapid Transit, that uses crowdsourced data to inform you where and when a train breakdown is happening, or how crowded a train service is. Mana is ‘where’ in Malay, and I guess the app’s name is meant to sound more like a question, as in, “Where got Rapid Transit?” Read more
If you’re a heavy social media or email user, there are times where you’d want to schedule messages to be sent in the future.
Be it a reminder to your employee to complete a certain task, or spreading out inspirational tweets for your social media accounts, Schedaroo is an iOS app that lets you do them all.
While there are plenty of apps that let you schedule messages for later, I haven’t really come across one that sends updates for Facebook, Twitter, and email, all at the same time. Read more
There’s a very good reason why Whatsapp is sitting on my homescreen right now, next to the phone function and my Gmail app.
That’s because most of my peers are using it, and being a rather late adopter of the iPhone, I had no choice but to purchase the app.
No doubt, Whatsapp is the dominant cross-platform instant messaging app out in the market right now. Its ubiquity is disrupting the telecoms industry by replacing SMS as the primary text messaging platform.
But that does not make it the best app of its type out there. The revamped LiveShare, developed by Cooliris and available on the iPhone, wants to lay claim to that title. Read more
