Home24.sg, Rocket Internet’s furniture store, will launch tomorrow, says insider

Provided there are no unexpected delays, Home24.sg, an online furniture by the Samwer Brother’s Rocket Internet, will launch in Singapore tomorrow. SGE received the news from a company insider, who declined to be named.

We’ve also received details and screenshots (below) of the alpha version of the site. Based on what we know, Home24.sg will offer about 5,000 variations of houseware, kitchenware, tableware, and lighting items. Their inventory will consist of a mix of local and foreign brands.

Customers will not be charged for delivery to their homes. They will also receive a refund if they find that the same item is priced lower in any other major retailer, or if the product does not suit their homes. The offer is valid within seven days of purchase. There are no delivery charges for refunds too.

(Read: Are the Samwer Brothers’s Rocket Internet really that bad for Southeast Asia?)

Home24.sg will face competition from other online furniture retailers like Courts, BEDS.sg, and Furnituremart.sg. 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

Kark is refreshing trading cards for the future, and they educate kids too

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

Despite brutal competition, Singapore’s fashion industry experiences a rebirth

It's a packed house at the retail launch of PARCO next NEXT's new labels on 14th April.

Globalization has dealt local fashion labels a bad hand.

It used to be that fashion designers in Singapore could fill a niche between mass market apparel from the department stores and expensive luxury brands.

David Wang, vice president of the Textile & Fashion Federation (TaFf), lived in that era. As a local fashion pioneer in the 80′s, the runway for him to maneuver was much wider. Global brands like Topshop, Uniqlo, and H&M were not around to compete for the Singaporean’s fashion budget.

But the times changed.

“During my time, Singaporeans had pride in local brands. The good old days are gone. Now they look at price,” he says, “they’re very practical. If they look at a dress from a local designer that’s $399, they won’t support her. They’d rather go to H&M to pick up an entirely new wardrobe.”

While there’s a lot of hullabaloo these days about the power of e-commerce as a powerful, superlative, enabler for startups, David cautions that the Internet’s low barrier of entry results in more competition. Some blogshops, for example, offer cutthroat prices for their items.

In the face of such a brutal environment, PARCO next NEXT was started in 2010 to prop up the local fashion scene. It is a fashion incubator that picks promising fashion designers and puts them under an 18-month training and mentorship program to learn the ropes of being a successful fashion entrepreneur. They’re incubating the third batch. Read more

Rocket Internet’s Zalora denies they’re in bad shape; Oliver Samwer’s visit routine

If this report by Willis Wee from TechinAsia is true, Zalora is in bad shape, and the feared Oliver Samwer visited Singapore two days ago for a marathon eight-hour “motivational talk”.

These allegations are false, claims Tan Wee, managing director and co-founder of Zalora Singapore, an online fashion retailer owned by the infamous Rocket Internet.  He denies the article’s suggestion that “the meeting is probably triggered by complaints Zalora has received from its customers so far.”

In fact, Tan Wee reports that his German boss was in fact quite happy with progress.

“The exact conversation he had with me was: ‘Tan Wee, good job, things are going well,’” he says. The visit was in fact a routine one, and this was the third time they had met in Singapore.

Since Zalora launched in Singapore and Malaysia, it has received a lot of complaints about slow delivery times on its Facebook Pages. Some items were not received even after two weeks.

While he acknowledges that many of the feedback are valid, and that they’re learning, Tan Wee questions if a few Facebook comments are enough to paint an accurate picture of Zalora’s health. Read more

Why fashion labels grow fast and die young

Grow fast, die young?

Does that have to be the mode for every fashion label, asks Carl Thompson, Co-founder of TradeGecko. Meet the former fashion label owner-turned digital entrepreneur who’s set himself a 100 day target to save small fashion labels worldwide.

Five years ago I launched Crowded Elevator, a fashion label in New Zealand. We started with a few boutique t-shirts and within a year we were wholesaling to over 50 retailers across New Zealand and Australia. It looked like the world was waiting for us. Then we died.

Wholesaling is no easy business. It takes a lot of time managing each section of the sales cycle. The administration required to manage inventory, orders, accounts, stockists, manufacturing and errors is completely overwhelming. If you don’t have the systems in place to handle such a workload the administration will kill all passion and ultimately the business, as it did for me. Read more

PayPal Here to launch in Singapore later this year; competes head-on with Swiff

All gloves are off in the battle for mobile payment dominance in Asia.

In one corner is mighty PayPal, which will launch its own mobile credit card reader called PayPal Here in Singapore later this year. It is already available in Hong Kong, Australia, US, and Canada.

In the other corner is underdog Swiff, a Singapore-based startup that launched its own mobile payment service last week.

Both companies’ service include credit-card swiping devices that can be attached to a mobile phone or tablet to allow merchants to collect payments without the need for costly POS machines. Read more

Swiff launches mobile credit card reader, but can it compete with PayPal?

With the open nature of the Internet, every tech startup faces the risk of being quickly rendered obsolete by well-moneyed technology giants.

For example, when Facebook Timeline launched, a small Chicago-based startup called Timelines.com sued, claiming that the social network could “quite possibly eliminate its entire business.”

Swiff, a Singapore-based startup that just launched its mobile credit card reader today worldwide, also faces competition from some of the world’s biggest tech companies. It’s not the first to do this either; Square, founded by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, launched in 2009.

The reader, attached to a mobile device, essentially allows merchants to collect payments without the need for expensive POS equipment, bringing cost savings and convenience. It is available on iOS, Android, and Blackberry.

The last time SGE featured Swiff was in October last year, and back then, there weren’t any players in this space in Asia.

But this month, PayPal launched PayPal Here, a similar service. It is already available in Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, and the US, and will hit other countries soon. Read more

Need test users for your startup? NUS wants to help you

Finding enough test users for your product or app can be a pain sometimes, which is where this Test-Bed Program comes in handy. Read more

How Standard Chartered Bank serves customers better by taking a 360° view of them

This geek has been following with increasing interest how banks operating in Singapore are innovating to better serve their customers in this day and age. From OCBC’s credit cards with personalized designs, UOB’s mobile cash (Barclay’s just announced their mobile cash service this week too), banks like Standard Charter Bank (SCB) have been innovating hard to improve their offerings.

They’ve recently well-received Breeze iOS app, which unfortunately cannot be used by corporate customers, and announced a 1.88 percent per annum return on your current account up to a maximum of S$25,000,  under the Bonus$aver‘s scheme.

That is substantial, especially in a time where local interest rates are much lower (you can check how SIBOR rates have dropped over here). This geek was curious to find the catch. Read more