SingTel announced in a press release today that it is acquiring GTW Holdings, the owners of HungryGoWhere, Singapore’s most visited foodie site, for S$12M (US$9.4M).

The site, which was started in 2007, has a presence in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Australia. Under the terms, GTW will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SingTel. It will merge operations with inSing.com, another SingTel subsidiary with an audience of two million customers.

With the purchase, SingTel claims it has the largest food and lifestyle audience in the island state.

GTW’s Singapore-based founders will play a crucial role in growing SingTel’s services in Singapore and beyond.

GTW will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SingTel. Its operations will be merged with inSing.com, also a subsidiary of SingTel, giving the combined portal an audience of 2 million customers, which SingTel claims makes it the largest food and lifestyle audience in Singapore.

GTW’s Singapore-based founders will continue to play an important role in expanding SingTel’s services in Singapore and internationally, according to the press release.

(Read our 2009 interview with Wong Hoong An, HungryGoWhere co-founder)

“A cornerstone of SingTel’s growth strategy is to build digital solutions that help consumers in their daily lives – as they live, work and play. Possessing the local knowledge and content is critical as it allows us to compete effectively in these areas,” said Allen Lew, CEO of SingTel’s Digital L!fe group.

“SingTel will continue to form partnerships for important and unique content, including in retail, entertainment and other lifestyle needs. The talented HungryGoWhere team has built a much-loved brand which has become the go-to site for restaurant reviews and information, delivering a great experience around one of Singapore’s favourite pastimes.” he said.

Dennis Goh, founder and managing director of HungryGoWhere, said: “This deal allows our award-winning content to be seen by even more people in the region and will accelerate the investment and distribution of our new online restaurant reservation system.”

SingTel plans to grow HungryGoWhere’s existing restaurant reservation system, TableDB, and help it scale across Asia. In Singapore, TableDB is competing with Chope and Reserveit.sg, which are the front-runners in the space.

The telecommunications company has been making a number of acquisitions in the digital media and advertising space of late. In March this year, it purchased US digital ads company Amobee for US$321M. In May, it bought AdJitsu, a 3D mobile advertising company.

Expect the Singapore giant to make more acquisitions in the coming months, especially in emerging markets. It has hinted that it will acquire non-phone businesses in China and India, in a move away from slow-growth markets in Singapore and Australia.

Early this quarter, more than 500 active mappers and volunteers joined forces across the Philippines in a series of Google Map Maker events that explored the benefits and fundamental steps toward building even more beautiful country maps.

The events kicked off with a Map Maker workshop in Manila, where Advocates and Regional Expert Reviewers worked alongside budding mappers. Their enthusiasm carried over to three Map Maker Summits: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, where the Filipino mapping community focused on the ways an accurate country map can lend itself to improved community planning, disaster preparedness and tourism.

The Google Technology User Group in Philippines (GTUG Philippines) have a very ambitious plan to have MapUps in 80 cities across the Philippines and would like to dedicate this activity for Philippine Tourism. Focus will be given to:

Tourist spots
Airports/Ports/Bus Terminals
Hotels and Resorts
Police Stations
Malls / Business Establishments
Pasalubong Stores
Barangay / City Halls

To kick things up a bit, they will be awarding the top mappers in the country! Please make sure you read the mechanics below for details on how to join the Map Your Town Competition.

For updates, to request for a MapUp or to conduct one in your area, please visit the Mapping the Philippines site.

Mechanics:

Interested individuals must register here.
This contest is only open to individuals based in the Philippines.
The Map Your Town competition shall start on May 16, 2012 and end 2 months later on July 15, 2012. Only approved edits during this timeframe shall be considered eligible.
MapMaker Advocates and Regional Expert Reviewers are disqualified from the individual contest.
The top 10 mappers in the Philippines will be awarded with netbooks.
For the mapper with the most number of contributions in the Philippines, PhP100,000 will be donated to a public school from his/her hometown.

This means that you won’t see any front row VIPs scrutinizing the models up close. Yes, no Anna Wintour-type tastemakers or wealthy celebrities.

In addition, this fashion week will let live viewers pre-order their favorite looks immediately after they spot it on the runway, and have it delivered to their doorstep within weeks. The show will feature the Spring/Summer 2013 collections from Singapore’s distinguished designers, as well as an unannounced guest designer.

DFW is a company set up by Keyis Ng and Charina Widjaja, and both used to work under Singapore celebrity singer Dick Lee in the advertising industry. Keyis also runs STORM Creative Events Agency, a public relations company.

In addition to the live coverage of the show and the backstage buzz, DFW will interview designers, models, hair and makeup artists, as well as performers from fringe events, feature live commentaries by key fashion figures and pre-show performances by international artistes.

Fashionistas can also download a mobile app to check out the livestreams, videos, photos, and even shop for items.

Fashion designers will be able to receive immediate feedback, both good and bad, from viewers. Pre-orders made by customers will give fashion entrepreneurs quick market insights about the pieces that sell.

In conjunction with the fashion show, an online B2B platform called DFW Digital Showroom will also be launched. Designers will be able to display lookbook images and pre-recorded videos on the platform, which is targeted at the press, buyers, and retailers.

Keyis is aiming for seven million viewers for this inaugural show, and he plans to announce DFW for other major cities soon. This is not the first time he has live streamed a fashion event.

His previous project, Fashforward.com, gave users virtual front-row seats to traditional fashion events. In May 2011, he and his team garnered some 500,000 visitors from 90 countries within a week.

“We aim to harness technology and creativity to promote home-grown designers in each city to the global audiences by capitalizing on the hype generated from the fashion shows. The buzz created will then be directly converted into sales and sync the fashion communication cycle with its retail cycle,” he says.

While there’s no telling how DFW will perform — so much depends on execution — an event like this is a refreshing take on an elitist industry that is dependent on upper echelon tastemakers to set the tone for an entire season.

For example, critically acclaimed documentary The September Issue shows that a single woman, Anna Wintour, who is the authoritative editor-in-chief of American Vogue, can singlehandedly decide what will be trendy in a US$300B global industry. Young designers anointed by Anna are put on a fast track to success.

However, ground-up initiatives like the DFW turn the industry upside down by giving independent designers more visibility, and letting ordinary consumers be the tastemakers for once.

Is seven million viewers an attainable goal? Maybe not. But props to them for aiming high.

With the extension of the National Research Foundation’s Technology Incubator Scheme (NRF-TIS), eight new incubator-funds have emerged last year. Among them is TNF Ventures (TNFV), which held an official launch last Friday.

The fund is founded by several veterans, consisting of a good mix of entrepreneurs, senior corporate executives and venture capitalists, mostly in the IT industry.

Specifically, the team members include Eddie Chau, founder of E-Cop and Brandtology, Shirley Wong and Steve Ting, both co-founders of the public listed BT Frontline, Tan Yen Yen, senior VP of Oracle, as well as David Su, Foo Jixun and Terence Tan, who are managing partners of their respective VC funds Matrix Partners, GGV and IPV Capital, all based in Shanghai.

Calling themselves investor-mentors (IMs), the partners of TNFV have vast experiences in building or nurturing companies from their infancy to success.  Taking the reigns to lead this stellar team is managing partner, Shirley Wong.

“We aim to to nurture the next generation of successful entrepreneurs. The by-product? To have wealth creation and job creation,” she says.

(More photos of the event on SGE’s Facebook Page)

TNFV stands out with its sizeable network of IMs. As the managing partner, Shirley will assign two IMs with the relevant expertise and experiences to each startup.

As a team, the IMs review their operations on a weekly basis, providing a platform to enlist any additional help from the other mentors.

As an NRF-TIS incubator, TNFV will invest up to S$600k per startup be it seed or Series A funding. It is seeking startups in the telecommunications, media, medical, and eco-related industries.

Staying true to its mantra of having fun, TNFV ended the day with a group of start-ups, who were pre-selected from a pool, playing poker.

The top three startups from the tournament won an exclusive dinner with the TNF Team to further fine-tune their pitch for potential funding.

For a hint of how the game went, even a pair of Aces (picture) could not win the game — a close semblance to reality where having the best team and idea may not be enough to make a successful start-up.

We’ve got to deal with market environment too.

Started in February, the fund is a collaboration between KDDI, a major Japanese telecoms operator, and Global Brain, a VC firm. The fund will invest in companies in Asia, Japan, and the United States, providing not just funding but also service development, platform for cloud services, and promotional initiatives.

Global Brain sees Singapore as a center of their upcoming activities in Asia, having already partnered with the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre. They have been managing several corporate venture capital funds for 11 years.

Startups can apply for the fund through the Global Brain website.

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.

While critics might argue that such trades defeat the purpose of loyalty cards since it diverts customers away, Squiryl co-founder Mulyadi Syariffudin disagrees.

“We gave up the [advertising] agency because we believe in burning our boats so that we can’t turn back.”

Customers who don’t like a product are unlikely to come back to the store anyway. So, why not exchange them for another customer who willingly traded for your acorns? With some acorns in hand, customers are more likely to visit a store since rewards are more easily attainable.

“If you lose one, you get another one. That’s the worst scenario. In the best situation, customers that get acorns spread the word, resulting in more sales for merchants,” he says.

While past apps have tried universal currency, merchants revolted because consumers can effectively get points at one brand and use it to redeem rewards at another. Acorns, on the other hand, are always tied to a merchant. They can only be used on one particular brand at a time.

The net effect is greater market efficiency. Instead of taking a slice of a small pie, Squiryl hopes to enlarge it by making the concept of loyalty points more relevant for customers.

They’re essentially hoping to do what Google did with Adsense: Making an entire industry more efficient, resulting in better returns for both merchants and consumers. Except that while Google is achieving this with algorithms, Squiryl is doing it with social exchange.

This social element is at the heart of Squiryl’s vision. Ultimately, they aim to be the universal social network for loyalty points — a fundamentally different approach from their competitor Perx, which is more of a marketing tool than anything else. Squiryl is working on more social features right now.

How Squiryl works:

Mulyadi was candid in his interview about competing with the more well-funded Perx, and how Squiryl lost out initially in the battle for merchants. Perx gained the advantage in Singapore with a clustering strategy — by targeting merchants in a particular area, those who didn’t use the app felt left out and wanted in too.

Even though Squiryl is forever free, merchants on Perx were hesitant to switch to another loyalty card program. Another painful lesson Mulyadi learnt was the importance of putting their product out there fast, even though it may be flawed.

Mulyadi also admits that Squiryl doesn’t have as much marketing muscle as their Saverin-funded competitor, and as such are less visible to consumers. This is painfully obvious to me — as I stroll around Singapore, the Perx logo is visible on storefronts everywhere, while Squiryl seems obscure.

But he and co-founder Alan Lee are a scrappy bunch: They’ve managed to amass 15,000 downloads and 6,000 monthly active users despite their constraints. About 100 store locations are on their program, issuing out a total of 9,400 acorns in March and April. They officially launched at DEMO Asia 2012 in March, six months after Perx.

Squiryl is determined to catch up. They have already set up an office in Indonesia and hired a sales team there. Their BlackBerry app will launch in a few days time, while their Android app will unveil in mid-June. They are working feverishly hard to get Indonesian merchants on board, aiming for 500 outlets and 150,000 users in Indonesia by November.

Mulyadi isn’t aware of any prominent mobile loyalty card app in Indonesia. Over there, the loyalty card scene is dominated by credit card programs, but he argues that these loyalty schemes build brand affinity for the credit cards rather than merchants.

It’s still too early to tell how the loyalty card battle will pan out. There’s still a lot of untapped retail real estate in Asia, and I’m curious to see who will be the first to develop loyalty programs for the white-hot mobile commerce industry. I’m also interested to see how Mobipoint and Spoqa will perform in South Korea.

The Squiryl team. Photo: Squiryl

For both Alan and Mulyadi, it’s a race not just against competitors, but against the clock. Both of them are married, and Mulyadi has four young daughters. Having bootstrapped all the way, the co-founders find themselves with a runway of six to twelve months.

Mulyadi himself was running an advertising agency before giving it up to pursue his dream. Alan is a serial entrepreneur who is proficient in web development.

“Me and Alan, we’re very particular, we gave up the agency because we believe in burning our boats so that we can’t turn back,” he says.

Their immediate concern for now isn’t revenue — but getting user traction. They’re also seeking the right investors, having previously rejected one who wanted Squiryl to scrape its trading program.

Having family commitments have imbued them with a sense of desperation — and this could work in their favor.

“We’re different from other startups because we’re no longer in our early twenties, so there’s more urgency for us. This thing has to work.”

The company won due to its ClearCell System, a cell-based invitro diagnostic device that isolates and retrieves intact and viable circulating tumor cells from blood.

It was the only Singaporean participant out of 18 total startup companies representing 12 countries. As the winner, it took home three million yen (S$47,000) and three years of free tenancy at the Tokatsu Techno Plaza in Chiba Prefecture.

Clearbridge BioMedics is a spin-off company from the Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore.

“Participating in this event was a great experience for us. We were able to network and present to an audience, including venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and potential partners. Japan is a very important market for us, winning this award will be a launch pad for us to bring the technology there,” says Dr Andrew Wu, project director, Clearbridge BioMedics.

The majority of the finalists came from business incubators or consisted of University spin-offs. The judging panel looked for innovativeness, the businesses’ economic and social impact, as well as the companies’ ability to implement their business strategies.

Moving forward, Clearbridge BioMedics plan to use the prize money to further accelerate the development of its next-generation microfluidics biochips. They also hope to explore a wider number of applications in the life sciences and medical diagnostic fields.

The company is started by ex-marketing professional John Fearon. Dropmyemail is a service that lets users back-up their emails on the cloud. It has amassed 500,000 users within two months of its launch, John claims.

The service works on a freemium model, offering 500MB of free storage while charging US$9.99 for 5 GB and US$19.99 for 10 GB of storage.

Vinoaj has been with Google for five years, but according to techcircle,  he prefers building up new companies, having worked at two startups previously. Users can get an extra 256 MB of storage per referral sign-ups.

The startup has been funded by Singapore’s Crystal Horse Investments, but it is now seeking a Series A funding of US$10 million.

While DropMyEmail is targeted at mass market consumers, DropMySite aims for a niche group by offering the ability to backup entire websites over the cloud.

John also runs EatAds.com, an online platform to buy and sell offline ads space.

Read:

Buy And Sell Offline Media With EatAds.com
DropMySite lets you backup your website over the cloud

2011 has turned out to be a breakout year for mobile commerce in Singapore, says PayPal‘s Online and Mobile Shopping Insights 2011 study.

The report has revealed that the country’s mobile commerce market has grown by 660 percent reach S$328M (US$259M) last year from S4$3M (US$33M) in 2010.

The study was conducted by The Nielsen Company online using a representative sample of 1,009 Singaporean online shoppers aged 18 and above. 482 of them are mobile shoppers, which in this study means that they have shopped or made purchases using a mobile phone or tablet.

The mobile commerce market is expected to grow ten-fold to reach S$3.1B (US$2.45B) in 2015, indicating that shopping on mobile devices has become mainstream due to the ubiquity of such devices.

More findings from the study below:

General consumer behavior

• Mobile shopping comprised about a quarter (23%) of all online shopping in 2011, nearly six times its share (4%) of the online shopping market in 2010.
• Mobile shoppers constituted close to half (48%) of all online shoppers in 2011, compared to about one in three (29%) in 2010.
• The median spend per head for mobile shoppers increased from S$93 (US$73)  in 2010 to S$354 (US$279) in 2011. There were 880,792 Singaporeans who made a purchase through a mobile device in 2011, compared to 364,390 in the previous year.
• The majority (75%) of purchases made using mobile devices were via smartphones.
• Singaporeans spent S$244M (US$193M) through their smartphones in 2011 – representing close to three-quarters of the total mobile commerce market – compared to S$82M (US$65)  through tablets.
• The average spend per head on tablets was S$380 (US$300), significantly higher than the average spend per head on smartphones, which amounted to S$274 (US$217) suggesting a growing market and potential for mobile shopping via web-enabled tablets.
• Four out of every ten purchases on both tablets and smartphones made at home.
• The office was the next common place to shop (18% of smartphone users and 11% of tablet users).
• Mobile shopping while commuting via bus or train or in transit was yet another preferred place for transactions (13% of smartphone users and 11% of tablet users).

Top spending categories for mobile shopping

Mobile shopping is much broader than just digital downloads with ‘fashion and accessories’ and ‘movie tickets’ seen as hot favorites for both smartphone and tablet shoppers.

• Almost a quarter of mobile shoppers indicated a desire to purchase fashion items, airline and movie tickets on-the-go with their smartphones indicating there is room for growth and that retailers have the opportunity to provide multi-channel shopping experiences in these categories.
• Tablet users exhibit a different set of preferences. Tablet users indicated they would like to purchase automotive goods and computer hardware. This suggests that compared to smartphone users, tablet owners are more likely to purchase higher ticket items on their devices due to the tablet’s larger screen size.

Graph: Top Mobile Spending Categories in 2011 in S$ millions

Shopping using QR codes
QR codes provide retailers the benefit of launching virtual pop-up stores across all channels and media and enable 24 by 7 mobile shopping to complement brick-and-mortar store locations.

• Quick Response (QR) codes are gaining popularity among Singapore smartphone shoppers. Four out of every ten smartphone users were aware of QR codes, and of those who were aware, 45 per cent had used QR codes for an average of eight transactions in 2011.
• The most common items purchased through QR codes were books, fashion items and computer hardware.
• Curiosity (33%) combined with ease-of-use (21%) were cited as the main drivers of QR code usage.
• PayPal’s QR code campaign with SMRT from February till April this year enabled an average of 500 transactions per 10,000 scans by Singaporean commuters, equivalent to a 5 per cent customer conversion rate, which is higher than the average direct email response rate of 1.7 per cent.
• Showbiz Asia saw huge mobile sales success by offering one-for-one tickets for award winning show WICKED to Singaporean commuters via this QR code campaign, resulting in close to five times increase in mobile ticket sales through PayPal as compared to sales for the same period pre-campaign.

Security concerns and lack of user-friendliness a barrier for consumers

While Singaporean consumers are increasing their mobile commerce spend exponentially, security concerns and the lack of user-friendliness were indicated as the main barriers towards greater adoption.

• 40 per cent of all mobile shoppers felt that mobile transactions were not safe enough.
• Other barriers to further adoption of smartphones for mobile shopping included “screen size is too small” and “Internet speed is slow.”

Photo: PayPal

While the official Facebook app allows for some basic Facebook Page management, it lacks a lot of key features. This new app has the ability to let social media managers post new updates and photos on their Pages, get push notifications about Page activity, view Page insights, and more.

The app is now available as a free download in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. More countries are expected to follow.

Take the app for a spin, let us know what you think and whether it is available in your country.