Singapore Entrepreneurs

Last night, the Barcamp II - Maps and Mobile Unconference has happened last night in NUS Extension, Park Mall from 6.30 to 10 pm. The event was organized by the combined team of Singapore PHP User Group, E27 (Garag3) and Barcamp Singapore and was the first local community event sponsored by Google Singapore. We kicked off with the registration and networking session among the particpants. At precisely 7.30 pm, we gathered everyone into the room for the keynote sessions. Originally, we estimated the number of people turning to be between 80-100, but it turned out more than expected to about 130-150. Hence, it was a great turnout from the local developers community in Singapore. In this narrative post, we also provide the links to related posts and pictures of event. The videos for the presentation will be uploaded soon.

After the quick introduction about the event, sponsors and organizers, Andrew McGlinchey, the Geo Product Manager for southeast Asia from Google Singapore kicked off with his keynote, “Building the Geo Web”, which gives an overview on the mission, some features of Google Map, that can allow users to share, create and publish interesting annotations on the web. He gave us an overview on how some Singaporean companies are harnassing Google Maps for their own uses here. I thought his twist in changing Google mission’s statement for Google Maps is interesting, i.e. “organizing the world’s geographic information and making it universally accessible and useful”. Andrew also provided some interesting demos about Google Maps, particularly, the feature which is present in the US, where you can navigate on the ground with the actual buildings around you.

After Andrew’s presentation, we have Gerard Lim, the Chief Technology Officer from Bak2u, who talked about secured mobility. Interesting take home messages I got was the statistics he presented about the number of mobile users in the world. It is surprising that one in 6 people are actually owning mobile phones out there. The main parts of his talk focus on the need to protect the mobile phone because more and more users are not just using it as a device to communicate but also a platform for them to store their private information from their own personal stuff to their friends’ numbers and addresses. He did offer some tips on how to protect your own mobile phone.

Once both talks are over, we proceeded to the breakout sessions, one on Maps chaired by Jon Petersen (SinGeo) and the other on Mobile chaired by Chandra (co-founder, Barcamp). In each session, companies from start-ups (Widegous, Shoplette, TenCube, Lilihood, Homespace, Mobile Sorcery) to big multinational corporations (Nokia) have presented their technologies, spurred with fun demos. I was running between the presentations back and forth, and have managed to catch some and not all.

If you think that it’s an unconference that have presentations, you will be surprised that one of the local web evangelists, Preetam Rai did a 5 minute presentation, sourcing interesting feedback about his idea of tagging a book. In fact, in order for everyone not to miss the Widgeous presentation, Chandra got them to present again to those who did not go to the mobile breakout session. Why so? It is the same day which Widgeous launched their beta and offered invites to those who attended the event.

On the whole, it is an interesting event to gather everyone here to learn from each other. Of course, we look forward to work with Google and any other companies who are interested to engage the local communities. While this quick narration of the event goes, we will be putting up links of blog posts, pictures and videos for the event soon here in SGE and other blogs.

Photo 1: Andrew McGlinchey in his keynote presenting Google’s mission statement.

Photo 2: The audience who attended this event. Basically we got the whole place flooded.


Photo 3: The Introduction slide to the event

Related Links:
[1] Barcamp Photos Album 1 and 2 by Lu Yee (kudos to her on being our photographer of the night).
[2] Ian Timothy, Thoughts On The Hits & Miss Barcamp Singapore 2 - Maps & Mobile Unconference
[3] Sek Ling, Widgeo.us @ Barcamp II photos.
[4] Frro.Net, Post Barcamp Thoughts
[5] Takashi Yoshida, BarCamp Singapore II (05/21/2008)
[5] Tokionic, We were at Barcamp Singapore!
[6] E27, Concluded - Barcamp Singapore II: Maps and Mobile Unconference.