With our first Gold medal in the Asian Youth Games, you might be inspired to follow all the news on the various events. Red Sports is a local site where you can get the latest news, view picture galleries and follow the school and youth sports screen in Singapore in general.

The team at Red Sports is still very small. Holding the helm full-time is an entrepreneur who saw the lack of school sporting coverage and decided to just start covering the games himself. After a while, it started gaining traction and since then, he has grown it to be come the leading school sporting news site in Singapore. Passion does lead to somewhere!

What need do you see today?

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Brought to you by the Lien Centre for Social Innovation, Social iCon 2009 is an experiential immersion in ideas and insights on what it takes to change the world.

Come 23rd October, you can listen to speakers from a wide range of sectors and disciplines, including 36 of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, successful businessmen, thought leaders, captains of the social sector, and some of Asia’s very own innovators.

Date: Friday, 23rd Oct 2009
Time: 830am-930pm
Venue: Conference Hall 1, Admin Building, SMU

0830: Registration

0900:
- You, the Innovator
- The Innovation Carnival Comes to Town
- Inspiring Innovations
- The Social Value Chain: Delivering Products that Serve the FulI Market
- Social Innovation & Government: How Can The Twain Meet?

1215: Bumdog Billionaire Banquet
1400: Innovators Upclose
1600:
- Infocomm: Igniting the Social Web
- The Turnaround Society: From Fast Companies to Fast Social Enterprises

1830:
- BARrier: Seeing the Light in the Dark
- OSCARS (Outstanding Social Concerns and Realistic Solutions) Nite

2130: Not Necessarily the End of the Evening

View speakers for each session and a more detailed programme.

Early bird (on or before 31 Jul 2009): S$500
Normal price (after 31 Jul 2009): S$700

If you are a full-time staff or board member at registered Charities/IPCs, you are entitled to some discounts.

Visit this page to find out more and register.

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As part of their 3rd anniversary celebrations Infocomm Singapore will be hosting an afternoon of high tea and networking. Listen to the panel speak on the future of Web portals, the trend towards Web 3.0, and how small and midsized firms can leverage on such changes.

Date: Thursday, 23rd July 2009
Time: 3-6pm
Venue: Orchard Ballroom 3, Orchard Hotel Singapore

RSVP before 17th July to contact_isg@portalcity.com.sg.

If you’re interested in registering for a booth, you only have 2 weeks left to sign up.

2.00 – 2.30pm: Guest Arrival
2.30 – 2.50pm: Welcome Address
2.50 – 3.10pm: Opening Speech

Future of Portals and its Trend, Movement of Web 2.0 to 3.0
by Mr Stuart Fenwick, Senior Director, Fusion Middleware GTMi, Oracle APAC

3.10 –3.40pm: Panel Discussion

Distinguished Moderator, Professor Chong Chee Leong, Associate Professor, Dean of School of Science and Technology, SIM University

Distinguished Panelists Include:

- Mr Stuart Fenwick, Senior Director, Fusion Middleware GTMi, Oracle APAC
- Mr Ken Loke, ChiefExecutive Officer, Bizmann
- Mr Daniel Wee, Deputy Director (Business Informatics), School of Information Technology, Nanyang Polytechnic
- Mr Ng See Sing, General Manager, NCS Portal City
- Mr Gerald Ang, Web Marketing Manager, Asia Pacific, Research In Motion

3.40 – 5.00pm: Refreshment and Networking Session

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If you are a geek, developer or programmer who works with technology most of the time ranging from Java, Python, C++, MySQL, Objective C, Android, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Linux and anything else in the Open Source Movement and otherwise, the GeekCamp is the perfect event for you. The event will be held on 22 August 2009 at Yahoo! Asia, Suntec City Mall, Tower 4, 8th Floor, Singapore. If you want to share your experiences in programming and web development, please go to the GeekCamp Wiki and volunteer yourself for speaking, organizing or even just turning up.

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If you are a diehard fan of crowdsourcing site, Threadless, here’s a made-in-Singapore one for tote bags. Co-founded by a young team of four, Common Totes relies on you, the community to submit designs to be voted on by everyone else. The most popular ones will be sent to print.

Applying the same successful concept of allowing everyday individuals to demonstrate their creativity for the whole world to judge, Common Totes has a call for design entries for tote bags all year round. Each winning design will earn the designer US$300. 2-3 designs will be chosen every month.

Two of the bags on sale at Common Totes.

Venture-funded Threadless makes about US$20+ million in revenue yearly with a small team of just 30 employees. The average profit margin they make per tee-shirt is 35%. If people are as crazy about community-designed tote bags as they are about tee-shirts, Common Totes may have the chance to pull off this same scale, with hopefully the same big numbers in revenue.

The all-male team have a few companies amongst them. One of them, Shannon Low was also the guy behind Shoplette.

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If you’re an Muslim living in Singapore and has always found it hard to find out where the nearest Halal dining establishments or mosques are, iAlif aims to solve that problem by providing a searchable location-based directory listing.

List of mosques.

Problem: Hard to find location information on Halal restaurant and eateries, or the nearest mosque for a prayer. You most likely need to have taken mental notes before.

Idea: Directory of the necessary information Muslims need like Halal eateries and mosques.

Solution: iAlif went live on 31st Dec 2008 and aims to provide location-based information on places that Muslims need. Now, all you have to do is to automatically let the system pinpoint your location or enter one, and look at the list of nearby Halal eateries or mosques found.

Money: Currently we see a few online display ads at the profile page. More can be done with web and mobile advertising. Their niche user base will be very attractive to clients who need such a targeted group.

Their social networking component leaves much to be desired.

I do think there’s a huge untapped market here that the likes of iAlif can fulfill. Even though you can find information on Halal eateries at HungryGoWhere, MUIS’ (Islamic Religious Council of Singapore) Singapore Halal Directory, and MUIS’ list of mosques; iAlif’s interface and auto-mapping of location and information makes it easy for the consumer to acquire the necessary information.

However, a big problem is that the information on Dining is not updated - at all. (The one for mosques seems fine and is iAlif’s trump card for now.) This search for McDonalds within 10km from 1 North Bridge Road only turned up one outlet at Bedok North.

Flawed information. Only one McDonalds outlet within 10km of North Bridge Road?

The real playground for iAlif? Mobile of course. They’ve made inroads with their Alif Prayer Time for Mobile. If they step up a notch on its dining search and go mobile with that as well, iAlif could be a real hit in the local community.

Problem now for investors is scale. With such a data-intensive model, iAlif will need to acquire the necessary data in the markets they’re trying to hit. And unlike Singapore, some markets may not have such data readily available. On the bright side, once they make themselves the key holders of such valuable data, they could easily gain loyal users in the various markets and be able to sell this traffic to advertisers.

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BL: Hi Jack, thank you for agreeing to an interview on SGE. First of all, tell us about your background and what are you working on before embarking on the World Toilet Organization (WTO)?
Jack Sim: I was a businessman since age 25 and at 40, I realized since our average life-span is 80, time is the currency of life and I need to use it meaningfully with a sense of urgency. Money becomes not an interesting pursuit anymore because I have to exchange time for money. It is better to exchange time for more meaningful impact for others.

BL: What inspired you to start the World Toilet Organization?
Jack Sim: In my search for meaning, I read one morning in the newspaper when PM Goh Chok Tong mentioned that we should measure our graciousness according to the cleanliness of our public toilets. I thought this is my calling and started Restroom Association of Singapore. After LianHe Zao Bao’s report, the public’s response was; “Somebody ought to have started this long ago.” They like it.

In 1999, I went to Tokyo for the Asia-Pacific Toilet Symposium and found 15 countries represented there. I wanted to bring that meeting to Singapore. Thailand and Vietnam also wanted to do the same. After my impromptu presentation about how the event will be organized and run like a swiss-watch, no traffic jams, global media coverage, professional management, great shopping, high impact, etc, both Vietnam and Thailand said: ” We are not presenting, we all going to Singapore.”

Next, I asked where is the world’s HQ for our movement. They said there was none. The Japanese host declined to lead because of language difficulty. So I offered to start World Toilet Organization in Singapore as a service platform and HQ. They agreed.

Later, the inaugural meeting became World Toilet Summit and our birthday 19 November became celebrated as World Toilet Day.

The first World Toilet Summit took the global media by storm and suddenly we are booked for 2002 in Seoul ( host Mayor of Suwon City/ Korea Clean Toilet Association), 2003 Taipei ( host Taipei Vice Mayor/ Taiwan Toilet Association), 2004 Beijing ( host Beijing Tourism Bureau). Later, 2005 Belfast Lord Mayor/ British Toilet Association, 2006 Moscow Mayor/ Russian Toilet Association, 2007 New Delhi President of India/ Sulabh International, 2008 Macao Asian Development Bank, and 2009 in Singapore this year.

It started as a hobby but got so addictive that I left my business operation to my managers and work full-time pro bono at WTO since 2005.

BL: What is the mission of the World Toilet Organization?
Jack Sim: We started as a clean toilet movement to improve design, cleaning and behavior. Later, we also extend to poverty, rural and slums toilets, sewerage, to meet the MDGs.

Through the massive media engagement globally, politicians and the global community found legitimacy to speak about toilets and we can attribute ourselves to the success in breaking the global taboo and bringing the issues to mainstream and center-stage attention.

BL: How does the organization facilitate many governments of the world towards clean sanitation?
Jack Sim: WTO membership grew from the initial 15 now to 200 chapters and we facilitate these chapters around the world with knowledge sharing, branding, media coverages and matching resources. We did some development program in Aceh, Sri Lanka, China but largely we partner others to do the implementation on the ground. Currently, we are also working with USAID in Cambodia. WTO does not have a large budget. We work mostly by leveraging others through an alignment of mutual missions.

BL: Are there any new initiatives which the organization is moving towards?
Jack Sim: Now we see donation is alone is not going to solve the problem of 2.5 billion people without access to proper sanitation. So we are mobilizing many factions: Businessmen, government, banks, micro-finance institution NGOs, UN system, academia to enter the sanitation marketplace which we calculate to be worth about USD 1 trillion. With profit motive, the solution will be sustainable.

BL: The World Toilet Organization have been involved in setting the standard for lavatories in Beijing prior to the Olympics last year? What are the challenges you encounter in convincing the local authorities to adopt the standards?
Jack Sim: It’s not so difficult actually except that you need to find the right party at the right time. For Beijing, the Olympics was a great motivator, so getting standards set, and investments for renovating public toilets to receive the guests is no problem.

In Singapore, we lobbied NEA to change the Code of Practice so ladies get more cubicles and do not need to queue up anymore for new buildings since 2005. We want to spread this law globally and so we partnered International Code Council of USA to start working on this.

BL: The World Toliet Organization has been cited as a case study on scaling social innovations to solve world’s problems in John Elkington’s “The Power of Unreasonable People”. Do you think that social entrepreneurs are really “unreasonable people”?
Jack Sim: Innovators are often seen as troublemakers because they disrupt the norms and status quo breaking people’s comfort zones to move into a new mindset. Our journeys are met with resistance every day. But our intention are good and this drives us forward. We are seen as unreasonable people because we seek to remedy social gaps that are unreasonable in the first place.

Many innovators are also under-resourced and this is another unreasonableness because somehow, we dream and make it happen regardless of circumstances. We want others to succeed doing what we do mobilize others into action.

BL: What are your thoughts on the trends in social entrepreneurship in Singapore?
Jack Sim: Our educational system is a meritocratic one: Study hard, get top marks, get good jobs, get rich and retire well. This is a selfish system orientated on economic scoreboard as a life mission. Jealousy is actually quite a great driver but we don’t get deep satisfaction from it.

On our last day of life, we do not say: I’ve got more money than you, hahaha… and die.”

So we need a kinder and more circumspect approach to society. The trend of the world is towards social entrepreneurship.

Fortunately, I am now seeing some rare green-shoots of genuinely passionate youths and even genuinely passionate bureaucrats. These are still in small numbers but I am encouraged by them. There is love in everyone’s heart. We need trends to open them on a large scale.

BL: How do you think that we can do more to promote social entrepreneurship, particularly in the realm of social innovation?
Jack Sim: As consumers become more conscious of the behavior of companies, they demand that companies behave responsibly. We are in early stage of this trend but I see it growing fast. While many companies still see corporate social responsibility (CSR) as low-cost advertising, they’ll soon learn that trends are pushing them to become real McCoys. You can’t say one thing and do another.

I hope Ministry of Education can add social service into their main curriculum and not just these enforced CIP hours which has no meaning to many students. They do it without their heart since school still focus on marks.

BL: What do you think are the three most important traits for an entrepreneur?
Jack Sim:

• Dreams of better world, identify and remedy social gaps.
• Mobilize people to act and not lead alone.
• Build strong institutions for the mission to reduce dependency in you.

BL: Jack, thank you for the interview, and we wish you and your team all the best in WTO and also any social entrepreneurship initiatives in the future.

Profile of Jack Sim:
Jack broke the global taboo of toilet and sanitation and legitimizes it for mainstream culture. After attaining financial independence at age of 40, he decided to devote the rest of his life to social work. He established the Restroom Association of Singapore (RAS) in 1998 to bring the subject of toilet to the centre stage. In 2001, Jack created the World Toilet Organization (WTO) as a global network and service platform where the various toilet associations, academia, government, UN agencies and toilet stakeholders learn from one another and leverage media and corporate support that in turn influenced governments to promote sound sanitation and public health policies. Since its inception, WTO organized eight World Toilet Summits and two World Toilet Expo and Forum. Last year, Asian Development Bank was co-host of the World Toilet Summit at the Venetian Resort in Macau.

Today, WTO is a growing network of 186 organizations in 56 countries. World Toilet Organization declared 19 November as World Toilet Day in 2001 and this is now celebrated worldwide each year towards improving the state of toilets and sanitation globally. In 2004, he was awarded the inaugural Singapore Green Plan Award 2012 by Singapore’s National Environment Agency for contribution to Environment. In 2005, Jack founded the World Toilet College to provide high quality training in Toilet Design, Maintenance, Cleanliness and Ecological Sanitation Technologies. The college is a joint venture with the Singapore Polytechnic. He also successfully lobbied the government changing the Building Code of Practice to have double the number of cubicles for ladies so that they would not have to queue up for the restroom. He holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in International Marketing from University of Strahclyde.

For his social cause on sanitation, he studied in Norway University of Life Science, the Stockholm Environment Institute, Harvard Business School as well as Harvard Kennedy School. Jack won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year awarded by Schwab Foundation of Switzerland in 2006. In 2007, Jack became one of the key members to convene the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance comprised of key players for sanitation. Members include UN-Habitat, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP, The United Nations, The World Bank, World Sanitation Fund and several other international groups working together to improve sanitation for all. The same year, he also became the first Singaporean elected to be an Ashoka Global Fellow. Ashoka is the largest social entrepreneurship support group in the world. In January 2008, Jack was appointed a Council Member to the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Water Security, as well as the GAC for Social Entrepreneurship. Time Magazine also named him Hero of the Environment in 2008. Jack is also guest lecturer for social entrepreneurship in Illinois University, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, INSEAD, and other institutions. He is happily married with 4 children and only 1 wife.

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Python web developers, read on.

Jook, Inc. is a fast paced startup devoted to making music a social experience again. The Jook product is a music sharing device that allows portable media players to act like personal radio stations.

Jook is looking for a passionate Python Web Developer to join its small team in its Singapore office. Jook is a subsidiary of Razer, and shares its offices, but functions day-to-day like a startup.

Work visas can be arranged, but telecommuting is unavailable at this juncture.

You’re a self-starter and need minimum supervision. You enjoy having strong responsibilities and getting cool things done. You’ve been waiting for the chance to work on an exciting new consumer product with no legacy code to contend with.

Required Skills and Experience:

Strong development experience in Python.
Strong experience developing server software in Python.
Experience with development using a (preferably open-source) relational database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc).
Experience using Python web development frameworks (Django, Pylons, etc).
Experience developing using web services (REST, SOAP, etc).
Experience using a source control system (Subversion, CVS, etc, but we’re using Git over here).
Understanding of web security and performance issues, and how to avoid them.
Pluses:

Experience building scalable web applications.
Javascript, CSS, HTML with a strong visual aesthetic sense.
Strong passion for programming and web technologies, reading programming blogs on evenings and weekends is something you’ve been doing for years. You have an opinion on Python 3.
Love music, friends ask you for music recommendations.

Perks:

Free lunch and drinks, pool table, gaming center, very casual work attire.

Direct impact and influence on the product.

Interested candidates, please submit your resume and some samples of your code/past work to joe@jook.us

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Our friends at Tech65 start their weekly podcast on the following issues that dominated the tech landscape last week: [1] Windows 7 Upgrade Options, [2] Tiny SG made MP3 Player Easy on the Wallet, [3] Amazing UK Plug Design, [4] Adsense Comes to Mobile, [5] MJ’s Death Brings Down Several Websites, [6] Android Discussion - HTC Hero, and Byte Of the Week: H1N1 Mask App. Do click and check out their podcast.

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BL: Hi Jeremy, great to have you here in SGE. Tell us about your background and how did you get involved with Twinity and Metaversum?
Jeremy: My background is in software and business. I started out in the language industry, working for the leading maker of language productivity software for about 7 years. From 2003 onward, I led the team that was focused on bringing our enterprise software package to the web. We created a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that was very successful and profitable. When you look below the surface, virtual worlds are also a SaaS application, with a client-server architecture and an emerging business model. That allowed me to bring together my experience with an exciting new area. I was present at the founding of Metaversum, having previously worked with our CEO.

BL: We understand that Twinity is a 3D virtual world that links the real with the virtual world based on realistic replicas of the world’s most vibrant metropolises. What are the three interesting features of Twinity that you will like people to know?

Jeremy: Twinity has a great set of baseline features that you’ll find in all the leading virtual world platforms, but the things that really set Twinity apart are the quality of the city environments, the ability to upload your own photos and create an avatar that’s truly you, and the multimedia features in Twinity. We’re able to create a lot of very exciting experiences that combine socializing, video, web content, in-world browsers, and game elements, all in a persistent 3D environment.

BL: Given there are many virtual worlds out there, how does Twinity distinguish itself from the other virtual worlds like Second Life and HiPiHi?
Jeremy: Really the main difference is the focus on the connection to reality. Twinity has real cities and lets the members be themselves, from using their real names to using their real faces. Twinity starts with the premise that a virtual world can enhance your life online, instead of escaping from it.

BL: Does Twinity open its platform for developers and partners? If so, how do developers and partners contribute to the platform?
Jeremy: We do have a developer program that interested parties can contact us directly to get more information about. Our approach on that side is largely to leverage existing tools and standards. For instance, Twinity supports Collada imports, which lets professional art and modeling companies re-use 3D existing content in Twinity.

BL: We understand Twinity has opened a replica of Berlin city as a beta. What are the activities that most users do within the Berlin virtual world?
Jeremy: We see most Twinizens (Twinity members) spending time exploring the city, where we have a number of the most important tourist and historical landmarks (and more coming), and then the social experiences. Most Twinizens get their own apartments, decorate them with furniture and embedded media, like photos and video. Then they invite their friends over and have parties.

BL: How does Twinity help brands to engage users within the virtual worlds? Any interesting case studies you like to share with us?
Jeremy: I can’t share numbers, like virtual item sales or views or so on, since that’s between us and the brand owners, but there are two examples from Twinity that I would like to talk about. Those are the movie launches for both The Spirit and Angels and Demons. For The Spirit, we created a set of sunglasses that Twinizens could wear on their avatars. That gave Twinity the look and feel of The Spirit graphic novel. With those sunglasses on, we put out a contest for creating your best screenshots or machinima (in-world video). The winner made a cool video that was posted on YouTube, and he won an autographed copy of the original. For Angels and Demons, we created a game in Twinity. It was based on the same theme of solving clues embedded in symbols and finding the answer to the mystery. Twinizens who completed the quest could enter a drawing for some cool prizes. These are examples of experience-based marketing, which has been proven to be more effective in engaging communities than traditional media advertising.

BL: What do you see are the trends happening in virtual worlds and where is heading?
Jeremy: I think virtual worlds are going to grow more and more in the next 3–5 years. Bandwidth improvements and GPU advances will continue to make the whole experience smoother and better. Beyond that, I think more web content will be integrated into virtual worlds. We see things like social networking evolving naturally into a virtual world, letting people go beyond asynchronous communication to more engaging 3D interactions with their friends online.

BL: What do you think are the three most important traits for an entrepreneur?
Jeremy: Persistence, vision and people skills. I do think you need some insight to see a big problem and come up with a simple solution to it. Once you’ve got that, you have to be committed and willing to work hard and long. And there are very few people in the world who can see a problem, design a solution and bring it to market all by themselves, so those people skills come in handy, whether for getting developers to write code for you, getting people to want to spread the message for you, or for working with investors.

BL: What are the challenges that you have encountered in setting up a company in Singapore? Any interesting thoughts to share?
Jeremy: Actually, I found moving here and getting set up quite easy. The only challenge I faced was on getting a bank account set up as a wholly foreign-owned entity (WFOE). I had to show a fair amount of documentation to get that squared away.

BL: Jeremy, thank you for the event and we wish you and Twinity all the best.

Jeremy Snyder is the VP Asia-Pacific, Operations & Community for Metaversum, makers of the online virtual world Twinity. Twinity is the first virtual world that mashes up with the real world, bringing the power of real people and real cities into a virtual world. Jeremy is responsible for day-to-day operations, support and community management at Twinity, as well as the Managing Director of the Singapore office of Metaversum. Jeremy’s past work experience includes 6 years in various online ventures, as well as 6 years in software. Jeremy has a BA in Linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) and an MBA in Enterprise Management from George Mason University (USA).

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