The 2011 Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum clearly thinks Singapore falls in the latter category. While it scores highly for lack of corruption, government efficiency (1st for both), and infrastructure (3rd), it lags behind for adoption of latest technologies (10th), measures that support sophistication of companies (15th), and capacity for innovation (22nd).

But overall, it is still the second most competitive economy in the world, behind Switzerland.

This means that while Singapore is a great place to do business, firms here have not quite caught up with the world’s best when it comes to improving their own processes and developing more innovative products. Government operations, on the other hand, have been on the cutting edge of technology, scoring second globally in government procurement of advanced technology products.

The survey gathers over 13,000 valid responses from 142 economies, for an average of 98 respondents per country, and captures the respondents’ perceptions of their countries.

These findings are somewhat in agreement with INSEAD’s own Global Innovation Index, which ranks Singapore highly for investing resources into developing innovation but penalizes it for the creation of knowledge and the production of creative goods and services.

In fact, when comparing the dividends reaped with the investment made, Singapore ranks an inefficient 94th.

Despite this blemish, there’s a lot of good news for Singapore. The Global Competitiveness Report compares the country quite favorably against other innovation-driven economies. It’s just that Singapore falls short of its own lofty standards.

But the government has only just begun to recognize the important of innovation, and they are now earnestly encouraging firms to innovate by pumping in money to support entrepreneurs and increase productivity in the workplace. Time will tell if these measures have been effective.

Photo: Nattu

Contributed by Chua Ruiwen, Wong Meng Weng, Luther Goh, and Justin Lee

Have you and your fellow hackers been working out of your living room for the past year?

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gosh, I wish there was a better place to work. I’m sick of staring at my partner’s face!”

If you have, you’re in luck.

Hackers, tinkerers and entrepreneurs will soon be able to get down and dirty with their projects in Singapore’s very own Hackerspace. No more staring at your bedroom walls, no more hiding yourself from the Starbucks’ waitresses sight.

And no, hackers are people who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations, not cybercriminals.

For the last few months, the local hacker community has been agitating for a physical space where they can get together.

Among the dozens of participants in the project are Chua Ruiwen, Wong Meng Weng, Luther Goh, and Justin Lee.

“We want to bring together technologists, designers, startups, and interesting people,” said Wong, “as part of the larger hackerspace movement. There are over a hundred hacker spaces around the world.

“Despite it being a Hackerspace, small startups are also welcome to join in the fun. Whatever project you’re working on, the Hackerspace welcomes you. You can bring your toys, build robots, give talks, or just hang out on the sofa and watch movies. Expect it to be a hotbed for intellectual intercourse.

“I’d like to see it happen at Kampong Glam. The atmosphere is bohemian and there’s good food available at all hours. Next year when *SCAPE becomes available we might set up shop there too.”

There are a variety of membership levels: $256/month buys a hotdesk, while trial memberships begin as low as $32/month and come with sofa-crashing privileges. Two anonymous sponsors have committed up to $1024 each, just to support the cause.

“We’re halfway to our funding target. In the last month we’ve seen over two thousand dollars in commitments. Now we need to get more pledges, and then we can sign a lease.”

If you’d like to see the hackerspace happen, check out the membership levels, pledge your commitment on the wiki or join the mailing list. And check out pictures of one of the proposed locations in the Arab Street area. (Source of Photos used in this post are from Wong Meng Weng).

Related Links:
[1] E27, What do Seattle, Silicon Valley, Berlin and Cambridge (both Cambridges) Have In Common?.

• Demo 1 – Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth: Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.

Why it is interesting: First, it shows how one can utilize similar images from the same object and create the 3D landscape in exactly how the object looks structurally. In Singapore, when some of us visited Microsoft Innovation Centre Singapore, we were treated the same demo with the landscape where the Merlion is situated by constructing different photo images from the public.

• Demo 2 – Anand Agarawala demos BumpTop: Anand Agarawala presents BumpTop, a user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3-D extreme, transforming file navigation into a freewheeling playground of crumpled documents and clipping-covered “walls.”

Why it is interesting: It offers a glimpse to us on how the next generation of operating systems desktop interface might look like, and using file size and other attributes with a graphical depiction to allow us to decide which files are important. Actually, we wonder why Apple or Microsoft has not bought over this idea yet for their new Mac OS X or Windows 7 interfaces.

• Demo 3 – Eric Giler demonstrates the usage of Wireless electricity: Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT’s breakthrough version, WiTricity — a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker.

Why it is interesting: This is one video which can show you the future where you don’t need to look for a socket to charge your phone or computer. It utilizes a traditional principle in physics using electromagnetism to get devices charged within a certain vicinity. You can already imagine that you can do the same with cars if you have a large plate in the parking area.

Editor’s Note: The abstracts of the talks are sourced from TED.com

Related Links:
[1] BL, My 5 Favourite TED Videos

Talking in generics regarding survival in a recession is useless without some numbers to back it up. Seeing exactly how much you saved (NOT) doing this or that provides you with visible encouragement to continue your cost-cutting ways. Here, we have guest contributor, Roshni, founder of Singapore-based TheAsianParent.com, share some of the ways they have cut costs and their corresponding savings.

Written by: Roshni Mahtani, Founder and Editor, www.theasianparent.com

We’re just into March but it’s hard to enjoy the New Year with the devil of the recession staring at us.

Sales orders have slowed down to a trickle, early stage funding has suddenly dried up, costs are skyrocketing and the bills are piling up. Trying to keep a start-up afloat and without retrenching anyone can indeed be maddening, to say the least.

Does the above sound familiar? If so, we empathise with you because well, we’ve been there and done that. We know how hard it can be to keep up with the costs of everything today, even a simple thing such as a water dispenser.

If you’re in the red and struggling to slip into the black, well it’s possible! We’ve done it! Here are some of simple measures we took as we shifted into cost-cutting mode…

The first thing we did was give up our office space and operate out of a home office. We hardly ever had clients come over and our mail was already directed to a virtual address business address, so there was really no point in burning extra money on office space. – Monthly Savings: $1,500

The second thing we did was shift to open-source software. Our online forum is now powered by phpbb, which is free. We use Open Office instead of Microsoft Word for our new laptops, and instead of wasting hours of manpower coming up with new templates for invoices, contracts, etc, we make use of the free templates offered online by companies like Microsoft. – One Time Savings: $4,000. Monthly Savings: $100

We switched to Skype instead of making IDD calls to our clients and staff in Hong Kong , Malaysia and Indonesia . We have also reduced our amount of fixed lines by just keeping two main lines, and having everyone else make calls out using Skype. – Monthly Savings: Between $100 – $150

We have hired interns to help us with our editorial and design load and where possible we outsource design and programming to students. – Monthly Savings: $500

We shuffle around with a 1 to 4 – day work week and spend the rest of the time working from home. This reduces electricity, telephone bills and the staff has a big smile on their face as they cut their commute time in half! We meet regularly on Messenger or Skype and have e-meetings instead. – Monthly Savings: $100

Our freelancers are given assignments in batches which effectively reduces the cost we incur per article. – Monthly Savings: $300

The salary of our sales staff has a greater weighting on commission to provide a greater motivation for our sales team to clinch deals. – Monthly Savings: Between $750 to $1,000 per sales staff.

We have formed a buying alliance with another startup, www.bestof.sg, so as to make use of bulk rates for printing of name cards, domain name purchases, etc. – Monthly Savings: $100 – $150

By switching to refillable ink cartridges and cutting down on printing, we’ve been able to cut cost significantly. We now print only when it’s absolutely necessary. For everything else we just PDF and send it across via email, including our media kits. – Monthly Savings: $200

Instead of spending money on marketing and advertising campaigns, we used Social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster and Twitter to build a pool of loyal readers. We currently have the biggest Asian Parenting group on Facebook, with over 13,000 parents from Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Indonesia. – One Time Savings: $2,600

Total Monthly Savings: Between $4,500 – $5,000 a month
Total One Time Savings: $6,600

So don’t sink your head in your hands and stay gloomy. Get a paper out and look for ways to cut-cost around the office and the home too! We’ve done it and it is definitely possible for you too!

Picture courtesy of christine [cbszeto]. (Yes, we know that the picture has *nothing* to do with cost-cutting. But we couldn’t resist, the baby’s just too cute.)

About The Author

Roshni Mahtani is the founder and editor of TheAsianparent.com, a Singapore-based online community that provides free quality content on parenting. They target urban parents and parents-to-be, who live in Asia or are of Asian background. The idea came about when she just a newly-wed trying to prepare for the next stage in her life – motherhood. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find many online resources devoted to Asian Parents. Having been in journalism for many years – she contacted a designer friend and www.theasianparent.com took shape and grew.

She has written over a hundred articles for the following glossies: Motherhood, Juniors, Healthy Pregnancy, Baby and You, Guide to Childcare, GOLF, Teens, Frequent Traveller, Computerworld Singapore, Computerworld Malaysia, CIO Asia, Tech-a-tete and Wedding Sutra. Roshni currently resides in New York.

Kudos to the E27 team, the Unconference Singapore 2008 held in Matrix, Biopolis had been a fantastic and well-organized event. It had an overwhelming turnout, hitting between 200-250 people. From a surprising excellent keynote from Daniel Ingitaraj (Director, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft) to the enthusiastic pitches from many start-ups in the event, it was a gathering of many enthusiastic minds for a growing and emerging Internet industry.

Of course, the event started with registration till lunch. There was an exhibition area where Microsoft had a booth allowing the audience to try out their latest Xbox craze, Guitar Hero II. Other than that, we have the founders from several start-ups, for example, Homespace, ZopIM, Eteract, Widgeous, Phlook, GoThere, Podfire, Hibernater, Yum.sg, PatSnap and many others featured here. Surely with the good food and drinks, we mingled around the area to watch demos from the entrepreneurs about what they have worked on for the past few months.

Following on, the event started with a keynote by Daniel Ingitaraj, (Director, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Singapore) entitled ““Innovation: Persevere or Perish”. In the talk, Daniel went from a slow start in defining two important ideas from Ted Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia” article from Harvard Business Review and Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” about disruptive technologies and talked about how technology has evolved from the past to present. He went to discuss the three major trends that is to come: (i) user experience, (ii) collaboration and (iii) cloud computing. The talk ended with some interesting demos (likely we will get a video soon). After that, the keynote was followed by the start-ups pitching about their products and demos.

Once that ends, the event is followed by the six major breakout sessions split between 2 hours: (i) Enterprise 2.0, (ii) What’s so difficult about valuing and investing in Internet Companies? (iii) Mobile Platforms, (iv) Social Media in Asia Pacific, (v) Web2.0/Mobile Startups in Eastern Europe/Africa/East Asia, and (vi) Interoperability for Startups.

The event has drawn a lot of people together, bring back old friends and new ones to the grassroots movement. Sometime back, Preetam (a well-known web evangelist in Asia) and BL (our editor in SG Entrepreneurs) have expressed a worry that they have been meeting the same people over different events in Singapore. Since the eBay.dev.shack till this event, we are heartened to realize that we are now meeting new and enthusiastic people from all walks of life who come and share their ideas and thoughts on the industry. Of course, we do have interesting photos to share with you for this event. :)

Related Links

• 1. Mohd Hisham, e27 Unconference LIVE Update using Plurk and e27 Unconference Summary.
• 2. Thinking Nectar, Unconference 2008.
• 3. Thinking Nectar, Unconference 2008 – More Start-Up Pitches.
• 4. Young UpStarts, Singapore Startups at the e27 Unconference Singapore 2008 and Photos from the event as well.
• 5. Claudia, E27 Unconference Singapore.
• 6. The Armchair Theorist, The E27 Unconference was Definitely Unboring.
• 7. BL, The IVF Drip – Realities about Raising Capital for Tech Companies in Singapore on the breakout session he conducted for the Unconference 2008.

Photo 1: Unconference Singapore 2008 Exhibition Area.

Photo 2: Peter Du and Michael Cheng at the Podfire booth.

Photo 3: Ridzuan evangelizing about the Widgeous platform at his booth.

Photo 4: Royston pitching Zopim to interesting enthusiasts.

Photo 5: Talk by Daniel Ingitaraj (Director, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft).

Our friends at Tech65 start their weekly podcast on the following issues that dominated the tech landscape: (1) More iPhone Talk, (2) Apple Introduces iPhone 3G Videoconferencing Kit, ZOMG!, (3) EFiX: OSx86 with a twist, (4) Dell E and E Slim revealed, taking on Eee and Air in one fell swoop, (5) Yahoo ends all talks with Microsoft, shares plunge, (6) Britain Launches Final Real-Life Skynet Satellite, (7) Opera 9.5 Brings Speed and Syncing to the Browser, (8) Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued and Byte of the Week : Firefox 3 to Drop on Tuesday. Do click and check out their podcast.