PayPal makes it easier for small businesses to grow and succeed

Sponsored article.

Every company has a beginning. It starts with an innovative idea, conceived by individuals who believe in it, and who go on to make it a reality.

People lament about how it isn’t easy to establish a business. And they’re right. But those who have stayed the course through sheer determination and hard work have reaped the rewards of success and satisfaction. Of course, a little help along the way never hurt.

And for some, that help has been PayPal. As an online payment solution, PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid. PayPal has over 14 years of fraud prevention and risk management experience to keep both buyers and sellers safe online, and has over 117 million active users in 190 markets. It is a one-stop solution for small businesses that accept credit card and PayPal payments in just a few clicks, without sharing financial information. Read more

clickTRUE raises Series A from Nusantara Ventures and expands into Indonesia

Next after Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, the Singapore online marketing and advertising company, clickTRUE just raised a Series A round from Indonesian firm, Nusantara Ventures. The team is under a confidential clause not to release the figures of the investment round.

Together with the funding, the Indonesian office of clickTRUE will also benefit from having a veteran in the digital industry in Indonesia join its board of directors: the founder of digital media agency Bubu.com and Managing Partner at Nusantara Ventures, Shinta W. Dhanuwardoyo. Shinta was listed as one of 99 Most Powerful Women in Indonesia by Globe Asia in October 2011.

In the press release, Shinta says, “There is so much potential for growth in Indonesia. clickTRUE has the expertise and tools to help businesses in Indonesia click their way to success. With the evolving internet landscape, it’s still very exciting for me to be a part of this even though I’ve been doing this for years. This is exactly what we need for Indonesia to move forward in terms of performance marketing in the digital space.”

With a 240 million strong population, and approximately 40 million internet users, Indonesia is an important market for clickTRUE as digital market penetration and patterns are just emerging. The current internet penetration rate is at 17% and it is rapidly growing but her digital ad spends only averages a mere 2%. As we’ve said before, “Where Google is, clickTRUE follows.” ; Google opened an office in Indonesia a few months ago.

clickTRUE’s vision is to differentiate themselves as a top specialist in the search marketing space in Southeast Asia. The first Google Analytics Certified Partner in Southeast Asia, the company was also accredited as a Yahoo! Platinum Search Marketing Agency Ambassador just over a month ago.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Jackie Lee, clickTRUE is held by Kyosei Ventures (where Jackie is also managing partner). Kyosei is also partly owned by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), where Jackie was after his previous company, HardwareZone was acquired by them.

Check out these 5 lessons about Indonesia that we gleaned from a conference there recently.

Asian startups that are shaking up how events are run (part one)

While the Internet is commonly being seen as distinct and separate from real life, that notion is increasingly being challenged. Augmented reality, as well as mobile commerce technologies like QR codes and NFC, are blurring the lines between the physical and virtual world, allowing consumers to transit seamlessly between both.

This trend is happening in the events space as well. Startups in Asia are at the frontier of this revolution, arming event organizers and participants with digital tools that enhance productivity and foster personal connections.

Here, we’ll look at just how these Singapore-based startups are shaping the way events are organized and merging them with the digital world.

Read more

High transaction fees and poor customer service from business banks frustrate entrepreneurs

What cheeses off entrepreneurs the most about business banks in Singapore? To find out, we did an informal poll on Facebook and got some answers: a huge chunk highlighted cost transaction fees as a bugbear, while poor service attitude and slow response times received a lot of enthusiastic nods.

We got a hint of these concerns from another group of entrepreneurs we surveyed a while ago. Many of them have been held back by long waiting times and queries that went buried. My own experience with UOB wasn’t ecstasy either. I attempted to contact them an entire Friday afternoon, and they virtually ignored me.

For overworked entrepreneurs who don’t have a lot of time to waste, such service standards are unacceptable. So I spoke to a few more entrepreneurs to find out what they have to say. Their responses below. Read more

OCBC bank most popular among S’pore start-ups, but it’s probably not the best

Do Singapore banks measure up in the eyes of start-up entrepreneurs?

In Singapore, it looks like OCBC is the most popular bank among start-up entrepreneurs for creating a business account. That is the result of a poll SGE did on Facebook and LinkedIn in which 127 entrepreneurs responded.

Here’s what we asked them: “As a start-up founder in Singapore, which bank do you go to and set up your local account?”

Actually, OCBC is the leading bank by a mile at 45 percent of the respondents. The others, DBS (17 percent), UOB (15 percent), and Standard Chartered (13 percent), were not even close.

With such a yawning gap, it’s easy to assume that OCBC is the best choice for every entrepreneur — but that’s not necessary the case. To find out more, we dug a little deeper, speaking to entrepreneurs and comparing the different banks ourselves. Read more

Forget Dropbox: Check out Insync, which syncs with Google Docs

Plenty of cloud services lets you store, share, and sync files across multiple devices. Dropbox and Google Docs are perhaps the most popular ones — but both have features that each other lack.

Dropbox has an offline client that lets users drop files into a special folder which will then be synced to an online account. But they can’t create Word documents and other files using Dropbox. On the other hand, while Google Docs has cloud storage and file editing capabilities, it has very limited offline functionality — users can only view files but not much else.

People who use both Google Docs/Apps and Dropbox have clamored for an integration of both apps for a long time. In comes Insync, a new online service started by Singapore and Philippines-based entrepreneur Terence Pua that hopes to bridge that gap by offering Dropbox-like features to Google Docs. Read more

How to outsource everything to the cloud (except yourself)

Remember the blurry old days when software was sold in boxes? If you were born in early 80’s, you might even have had the joy of installing software from floppy disks. Gladly, those times are past us.

Setting up a website, building a customer database, sending out newsletters and many other impractical tasks have become affordable for everyone, at a fraction of the costs 20 years ago, thanks to a plethora of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses.

Here you’ll find a brief overview of web-based services that you can start using today to help bootstrap your company. Read more

“I fell into an antisocial, hermit crab phase”

This is the third article from the “Mistakes made, lessons learnt” series. Check out all the articles here.

Websites & founder: SingaporeBrides.com, SingaporeMotherhood.com, Ng Chin Leng

Biggest mistake made: Assuming that everyone will think highly of his idea and participate.

Most memorable setback: Having only two clients in the first year of business. Read more

Setting up a ‘Board of Customers’

Too often, businesses treat their customers as a statistic, or worse, a cash cow to be milked. But such an attitude may not be healthy in the long run: It may even harm a brand since a customer’s moos… I mean, feedback is treated as nothing more than noise.

For startups especially, listening to customers is crucial for iterating your product, which is why they deserve an equal pedestal alongside your colleagues and the investors that you’re seeking to fund your company. Read more

Can The EZ Suite dethrone LiveJournal in Southeast Asia?

So you’re an aspiring entrepreneur looking to step up a blogshop selling apparel, shoes, catfood, or anything your awesome mind can conjure up. You’ll be happy to know that LiveJournal and Blogger, trusty old venerables in Internet time, are no longer your only options — a new kid on the  block has arrived.

The EZ Suite is a new website creation tool by PayPal and Singapore Post that’s built from the ground up for e-commerce. Available only in Singapore at the moment, it is targeted at startup founders with lots of passion but little technical know-how, and its interface is designed for ease of use with step-by-step instructions and illustrations. The whole process of stepping up shop is broken into six distinct steps, ensuring that you don’t miss out on crucial bits. Read more