Sure, the world is getting increasingly wired and a wifi Internet connection is becoming as common and taken-for-granted as water, but such luxuries aren’t always readily available in most countries.

Even in shiny, high-tech Singapore, there are spots in town where the free wifi connection is wonky, or inaccessible because it needs a password.

So, how does a driven, power suit wearing entrepreneur ensure that she closes that sale or troubleshoot an urgent, looming crisis that threatens her business?

Flexiroam offers a possible answer. Founded by Jef Ong in 1st April 2011, Flexiroam is a Malaysia-based company that offers travelers unlimited calls at over 200 countries for a flat rate. So, if I’m a Singaporean on a business trip in Jakarta, I can make calls to Singapore and receive incoming calls — both unlimited — at S$10 (US$7.70) a day, saving me from extravagant roaming charges.

To use Flexiroam, I’ll need to purchase an overseas SIM. I’ll then be given instructions on how to connect my number with the Flexiroam gateway. After I switch to the overseas SIM upon arrival at my destination country, I’ll need to send a text to tell Flexiroam to direct all calls to my mobile phone.

Such a scheme has the added convenience of allowing you to retain your existing phone number while overseas.

While the service was initially available only to Malaysians, it has since launched in Singapore the past November, with plans to establish a physical presence at Changi Airport soon. According to Nicholas Yeap, Flexiroam’s marketing chief, they expanded to Singapore because “on average every Singaporean travel out of their country at least twice a year — four times more than an average Malaysian.”

India will be their next stop. Already, they have two offices there — one in Delhi, the other at Indore. “They have the largest airport in the world and are growing more than ten percent yearly in terms of international outbound passengers. We foresee that more Indians will be traveling out of their country for work or holiday.”

So far, reception towards Flexiroam has been promising. Jef Ong, the founder, has received much press coverage and recently auditioned for DEMO Asia. He told Malaysia Entrepreneurs in November that the company has saved businesses over 700,000 Malaysian Ringgit (S$290,000) and served over 2,000 customers.

Nicholas told SGE that 400 corporate customers have used Flexiroam at least twice in eight months. They’re partnering with 500 travel agencies to bundle Flexiroam with their travel packages from February 2012. An agreement has also been signed with Malaysian Airlines to offer special packages to their 20,000 staff. Altogether, they’re registering a 30 percent month-on-month growth in terms of sales and subscribers.

In Jan 2012, they will be launched Flexiroam Infinity SIM, which is a SIM card bundled with a Flexiroam pass. This product caters to power users who don’t want to waste time buying a local SIM and would rather have a card that works in 121 countries, including South Korea and Japan. A data plan for travelers to Europe can be included.

Jef has been bootstrapping his business all the way, and they have sufficient resources to roll out their operations in Malaysia and Singapore for the next twelve months. Nonetheless, they are already talking to several venture capitalists to go regional, although nothing is concrete yet.

I set off to Subang Jaya for Barcamp Kuala Lumpur (KL) on Friday morning. I reached a day earlier to meet up with some internet specialists and organizers of Barcamp KL. The last Barcamp KL was held in the KLCC area (where the Petronas Towers are). This event was held over the weekend (4 and 5 April 2009) in Inti College, Subang Jaya. The trip turned out to be a good one because it grew to become Barcamp Southeast Asia, with other organizers from Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo & Cambodia. This time round, we have wi-fi available, and the other thing I liked about the location is that the Inti College is located besides the Asia Cafe and also a Starbucks Cafe where I can grab a cup of grande vanilla latte.

Like the last barcamp, this is a two days event with different topics from different speakers. There are significant differences about this trip as compared to the last trip. There are seven to eight rooms available for speakers to get into the frame and spread their thoughts and ideas. Other than technology (mainly in the Internet space), we have topics ranging from social & youth entrepreneurship, corporate brands with social media, bloggers, to even salsa dancing. I did one presentation (which I will talk in another post) on Saturday (so that it will be cosy and fun for me on Sunday) and took part in lightning talks this time round with the ever enthusiastic host Fadil to get all of us rolling. Of course, I picked up a couple of interesting thoughts and facts on entrepreneurship which I will not find elsewhere other in the barcamp:

• Entrepreneurship, Wealth and Innovation: Meng Weng, one of the SG angel investors created an interesting about entrepreneurship and wealth with a U-curve, with the x-axis being the wealth an individual have and the y-axis being the necessity of entrepreneurship. In his model, there are basically a couple of conditions which are of interest: if you are poor and hungry i.e. low wealth and high necessity of entrepreneurship, there is a need to be an entrepreneur to keep yourself alive. Hence you end up starting enterprises (from chicken rice stall to basic goods trading). If you are rich and you are an entrepreneur, you will also end up on the other extreme end of the U-curve, and you will focus on setting up enterprises with competitive advantage and innovation. Hence everything in between falls in the dip of the U-curve, which means the middle class. That may be an explanation to why there is a shortage of entrepreneurs in Singapore. Most of the citizens are in the middle class where they earned enough wealth and there is a lack of necessity to start new companies. The inertia is that you will prefer to work for a big company due to parental and peer pressures. People who are into setting up new companies have to deal with different realities that most people do not face. We also have a long discussion about innovation which I think that I will soon write a post about sometime in the future.
• Youth Entrepreneurship: There is the panel entitled “Perils to Youth Entrepreneurship” with my counterpart, Daniel Cerventus (MY Entrepreneurs), Aidan A Chew, Michael Teoh, Jason & Melvin moderated by Hakim Albasrawy. Most of the discussion centered around whether there is a need to spread awareness of entrepreneurship, and dispel the myths of entrepreneurs do not need to stick to a 9 to 5 schedule. However, one interesting issue that popped up during the discussion is that Singapore has the same problem with Malaysia on dealing with the problem of MLM marketers, traders and dodgy Ponzi scheme players running around with the false flag of entrepreneurship. If there is a good take-home lesson, all the panelists with the audience agreed that entrepreneurship is a very difficult endeavour and packed with suffering. While I myself advocate telling the bad parts to scare away young people from it (and let them decide if it is right for them), the panelists prefer an positive approach with some warnings to the young entrepreneur. One other myth that most people dispelled is the issue of education. In fact, even the panelists concede that some of the more successful entrepreneurs in Malaysia have top class education in the UK and US. The norms and the exceptions should be played out properly. In fact, strangely, both Singapore and Malaysia have very similar support structures for entrepreneurship and yet we faced problems that are common to both countries. If there is one take away from this panel, the question for anyone who plan to be an entrepreneur is “What do you want in life and why are you doing this?” If you do have the answer for this, you should reconsider.
• Colin Charles talk on Advertising & PR, Bloggers & Integrity: A talk that grew from a small number to full house was Colin Charles (aka bytebot) about blogger, PR and integrity. In his talk, he discussed the differences between a blogger and journalist, the issues with blogging advertising networks and how media buyers are directly engaging the bloggers without them. He advocated an interesting policy about Google on social media. Apparently, if you do not have public disclosure on writing a review about a product and get paid by the agency to do it, Google can penalize your Google page rank if they found out about it through their automated analytical tools.

Lastly, when I was in barcamp KL, some friends believed our April joke and told us that they thought that SGE and MYE are planning to merge. I just smiled and say, “Why not if the conditions are right?” Indeed it has been a great event and brought together barcamp participants & organizers from Thailand, Cambodia, Japan and Singapore. We should have more and not less barcamps. :)

Photos for the event:

[1] The event stands on Pre-Barcamp Night

If you have any other links pertaining to this event, let us know!

Our friends across the causeway will be holding Barcamp KL on 4th & 5th of April 2009 in Level 4, Inti College Subang Jaya. You can check out more information about the sessions and venue via their wiki page. If you are keen on web development, social networks and new ideas from Travel 2.0 to Fashion, this is definitely the event to go. BarCamp is basically a very open, participant-driven workshop event where people share knowledge and ideas and expand their social and business network. There is usually no particular theme. Those people who want to share ideas and knowledge – of any subject, in any field – could register for time and room to host their session. Then, the rest of the people could come to event for free and join any session that they are interested in. If they find that the session uninteresting, they could just leave and go to the next one. Note that Barcamp Singapore III is just over and we are looking forward to the KL and Bangkok one in the coming months.

Our very own Bernard was one of the first presenters of the full-day event while his two counterparts, Gwen and Isaac Timothy T were in the audience skipping around from room to room. Here, we hear from both Gwen and Isaac Timothy T on their thoughts on various presentations.

Barcamp Singapore 3 was one of the best ever – there were many different interesting personalities, speakers and presentations and the crowd was very varied. We saw many new faces this time compared to other social media events (you know how it is, always the same crowd hopping from event to event, making each event a standard gathering of friends).

At any one time, there were 4-5 speakers giving presentations in the 5 different rooms. All the while many members of the audience and fellow speakers constantly tweeted or live blogged. As a result, as increasingly with the social media events in Singapore and Asia these days, events extend their presence and participation online. There was even a live video presentation by Kevin over Skype.

Some of the statistics that Chandra presented on his team’s study on Google Ads were interesting. They analyzed 10 million ads and these are some of what they found:

“www.sgentrepreneurs.com” will get us more clicks than “sgentrepreneurs.com”

- The “www.” gives users an extra sense of security compared to without.
- But something that wasn’t discussed is that perhaps the “www.” subtly emphasizes that it’s a webpage that users can click through to.

“www.sgentrepreneurs.com” will get us more clicks than “http://www.sgentrepreneurs.com”

- “http://www.” takes the reader too much time to read from left to right.

An ad with more than two symbols (eg. $@!#&) decreases click-through rate.

- Maybe users can turned off by the symbols (akin to virtual swearing).

If your sentence is “Buy flowers and gift cards here.”, keep it as ‘and’ and not use ‘&’.

- “Buy flowers and gift cards here.” is better than “Buy flowers & gift cards here.”
- My guess is that this subtle difference between using an ampersand versus spelling out ‘and’ has to do with the way we humans process language. I might be inviting severe criticism from expert linguists here, but language started off as a purely symbolic language (how one pronounces the word has nothing to do with how it looks, look at Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese, for one current example). Languages like English and Spanish are evolved languages and their script have come to signal certain sounds (aka pronunciations) and thus meaning in humans. Thus, when we see “and”, there is an automatic trigger of the pronunciation of the word which then also signals its corresponding associated meaning.

So putting an ampersand in place of ‘and’ effectively moves away from our (now) normal way of processing the English language (in this example, this could very well be applied to other languages). Readers now have to decode ‘&’ before going on to the next word. The delay could be extremely miniscule but nevertheless counts against your ad. Most of the decision-making process is too much too subtle and quick for us to perceive. You might like to argue that ‘&’ saves you space and gives your ad more ‘variety’, but you got to think from how your (human) reader will take it in consciously, and even more importantly, subconsciously.

Conclusions:

- All text might be good. Save for a last exclamation mark at the end. Like this!
- Always include “www.” in your web address.
- Make sure to do your own test of various versions of your ad, and don’t just rely on the above statistics alone.

Prior to Barcamp, Claudia did an informal survey of how people on Facebook interact with Groups and Pages – the two main types of accounts companies can utilize. Some of the key results that she presented in her slides:

Why do people join groups or pages?
- 71% wants to be updated of the group’s or page’s activities and events
- 58% join because they’re interested in the content
- 57% wants to find out more about the subject matter
- 11% check their groups or pages daily
- 60% check when updates are received (unfortunately, she didn’t have stats on how often users read their messages when they come from a group – this would be extremely useful in comparing the reach of both)

The statistics themselves were pretty interesting but not as exciting to a potential brand or company who wishes to construct a Facebook strategy to engage users. It is pertinent to understand the implications behind the statistics and use this understanding to better serve your user.

Also, any decent company seeking to construct a Facebook marketing strategy should always know the differences (both big and small) between Groups and Pages. Some examples include:

- The ability for Groups to send a direct message to all users into their Inboxes whereas for Pages, you’re not allowed to do so. The mechanism is to send an Update to users, which currently will appear on the top right-hand corner to the user.

- The direct messaging facility only works if you have <5000 members, thereafter, Facebook will only send to a random list of 5000 members from your total list.

- But, you can target your Updates to certain users (say limited to a geographical region) in Pages.

- You can customize Pages with various different applications, you can't do that with Groups.

- Analysis of your Page is possible with "Insights": see how many people viewed it etc.

There are definitely more to explore and companies and brands should play around with the two.

SGE also has a Facebook Page and Group.

For an collaborative event like Barcamp, nevermind the excellent speakers or presentation, ultimately, what makes such an event truly memorable are the conversations one has with fellow participants.

Be it asking questions during a presentation, chipping in with a point or two (speakers are not the only experts in the room, the audience also contains many people with valuable points worthy of sharing) or simply chatting with the person behind you in the queue for food during break time, you will already find yourself getting more involved and engaged.

As more people follow this personal engagement guideline, the event becomes richer with more interesting conversations either happening in public (speaker presentations or small groups) or in private (one on one).

BarcampSG3 was the best barcamp I’ve attended in Singapore. There was something about this mix of individuals who started gathering together on an early Saturday morning that was different from the other events. Maybe it was because this event had a lesser percentage of people who were wannabe startup founders. Maybe it was because this didn’t feel like an event about how you can use some latest technology to create some hot new startup but how technology could fit into your everyday life. Or maybe this event had more talks so I had a chance to attend different kind of talks which weren’t just about Web2.0 high-fiving, backslapping and regurgitation of what can be found on Techmeme.

One of the most enjoyable talks I attended was the one given by the Cambodian blogger Kalyan. She shared about the grass-root level activities that were being done by bloggers from Cambodia ( rather affectionately called ‘Cloggers’ ) and the way they were organizing themselves online and offline. They ( the Cambodian bloggers ) really do seem like people that Singaporean bloggers can learn from with regards to social activism offline.

An interesting thought that came about from listening to her was how bloggers could really be effective ambassadors to promote tourism for their home country just by doing what they do which is really about sharing their lives and thoughts both online and offline. I’m pretty sure that Kalyan isn’t sponsored by her country’s tourism board, but after listening to her share during the session, I really felt like Cambodia was the next destination I should travel to.

This was, perhaps, the most educational session I ever experienced at any of such events. Coleman isn’t just knowledgeable, he is charming and a great presenter with the right amount of humor. If there was a way to attach an affiliate link to the polar bear book and for the audience to purchase the book on the spot, Coleman would have cleared a fair amount of commission that day.

Yes, he was that good.

Rambling Librarian’s session was a great showcase of how Creative Common and the new tools to collaborate easier online could open a floodgate of personal creativity. He also share a good way to get known online – be shameless. Of course, he already had some quite decent music to share. Check out his music here.

The Malaysian contingent that came down to join us for the event was amazing – both fun and intelligent. There was even a story that will one day be legendary. Ask Daniel CerVentus from Malaysian Entrepreneurs to share the story about a certain individual who made a monumental effort to join us for Barcamp Singapore. Because of these individuals, I think I’m heading north for Barcamp Malaysia.

Last thought – maybe it is time to stop thinking about Barcamps at a national level. The second part of the event name like ‘Barcamp Singapore’ could, and maybe should, be switched mentally to just be a reference to the city and not the country.

BL: Hi Daniel, thank you for accepting this interview in SG Entrepreneurs. For a start, tell us about your background and what you have been doing before you started Malaysia Entrepreneurs.

Daniel: I have been an entrepreneur for over 10 years. Started in the web business in selling cars online. We convinced our uni to fund our first start up. however timing was not right and we did not had the experience so the company fell into the dead pool. Was later involved in a lot of freelance gigs in terms of internet strategies to hone my skills and got involved with various start ups. My last company before MYe is an education based company which i have since exited from.

BL: What prompted you to start Malaysia Entrepreneurs?

Daniel:The reason to start MYE is because I believe there is no good platform for entrepreneurs in Malaysia to connect with each other. The entrepreneur scene in Malaysia was pretty dull and boring so we decided to create a resource and network for all entrepreneurs in Malaysia.

BL: Who are the people that you want to reach out? Is Malaysia Entrepreneurs for awareness or providing information for Malaysian entrepreneurs to seek funding?

Daniel: Our core audience are entrepreneurs themselves but we do hope it acts as a catalyst for people to inspire to take up entrepreneurship as a career. I believe it is the same in Sg and most part of Asia that people give you a weird look when you tell their friends they are entrepreneurs. I think we play a role to change the perception to make entrepreneurship a respectable career choice.

BL: How is the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Malaysia looks like? What kind of challenges and obstacles that a Malaysian entrepreneur face in setting up a start-up?

Daniel: Currently there is a lot of people trying out new things especially in terms of web based ventures. There is more connections and collaboration among the entrepreneurs in Malaysia. As for challenges i think it is more of the internal challenges that most entrepreneurs in Malaysia still aim for only he Malaysian market. 27 Million ppl is still a very small population.

BL: What are the funding schemes like in Malaysia which the entrepreneurs there can utilize when starting a new company?

Daniel: If you are a technology based entrepreneur. There are two key grants for the pre seed stage. one of them is Cradle.com.my and the other is the MSC PreSeed fund. Both of these conditional grants goes up to RM 150K for you to conceptualize your idea into a prototype.

BL: What features do you want to incorporate into MY Entrepreneurs for the near future?

Daniel: We are producing a vidcast for our interview and the rest will be reveal after Q2 2009. However there will be more community building events where we hope to work with more regional players.

BL: As we often see you coming down to Singapore and attending our tech events, what are your thoughts about the tech scene in Singapore and SG tech entrepreneurs in general?

Daniel: I believe the people in singapore are great. I was really inspired to see how vibrant the community is. There are also a quite a few exciting start ups which I think will be rather big in the future.

BL: What do you see as the three most important attributes for an entrepreneur?

Daniel: Aspiration, perspiration and innovation

BL: Are you working on a start-up now? What are your plans in the near future?

Daniel: I am working on 2 main projects at the moment besides MYE, there are Earth247.tv and Jomcode.

Think of Earth247 as video news site where you discover news from your network. The idea came about when we were wondering how would a news network like CNN will look like if it was started today with all the new technologies available.

Besides, news is generally about delivering authenticated, accurate and speedy information to the audience and we believe there is a niche in terms of video sharing platform.

Jomcode.com on the other hand is a boutique web development house. We specialized in developing working prototype in either Ruby on Rails or Php.

BL: Thank you for your time, Daniel. We wish you all the best in all your projects.

Since the last barcamp gathering in Kuala Lumpur, July 2008, both the Singapore and Malaysia teams have decided to bring together people across both causeways together. The result is Barcamp Johor 2008, where it is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. The event will be held on 6-7 Dec 2008 over a weekend. The event will be held in Menara MSC Cyberport, Level 29, Menara MSC Cyberport, No. 5, Jalan Bukit Meldrum, 80300 Johor Bahr. This is a good time between the developers, investors and entrepreneurs to share their ideas in such challenging times of the financial crisis. For those who are interested to turn up or sign up as a speaker to this event, please register here and also check out the sessions. If you are interested to follow this event, check out their blog and also their twitter feed for the latest news.

From our friends in Malaysia Entrepreneurs together with the coming Global Entrepreneurship Week, it might be a good time to pull an ad for an interesting event happening in Kuala Lumpur. Startup Camp KL 08 is going to be the largest unconference for entrepreneurs and startups in Malaysia. Over 300 entrepreneurs from all walks of life and sectors are expected to congregate in two full days of ideas exchange and making connections. Startup Camp is held in conjunction with the Global Entrepreneurship Week and it will be on the only National Level GEW event. It will be on 22nd and 23rd November. For those Singaporeans who might be turning up in Malaysia, you can check out the event from here. We wish them all the best in their event. :)

Before the gathering in Barcamp Malaysia, an interesting meeting happened between Daniel Cerventus, the main organizer of Barcamp Malaysia and BL, our editor in SGE here in Singapore (who also happens to be one of the organizers for Barcamp Singapore II). After an interesting discussion, both editors felt that it is necessary and win-win for people in both countries to collaborate a lot more on grassroots level in the realm of entrepreneurship, venture capital and technology innovation. At the same time, Daniel is preparing for the launch of the Malaysia Entrepreneurs blog while organizing the barcamp. A successful Barcamp Malaysia event brought the technologists, entrepreneurs and investors from both countries together. It is of no coincidence that something is borne from that meeting. SGE is pleased and honoured to announce that the Malaysian Entrepreneurs blog is finally up and running. To enhance cooperation between Malaysia and Singapore in the grassroots level, both blogs will start off with an initial joint collaboration with syndicating the news between both blogs and at the same time collaborate more on cross country level in related entrepreneurial initiatives in technology entrepreneurship. Our team in SGE wishes our friends from Malaysia Entrepreneurs good luck on their new initiative and we look forward to interesting times of collaboration with our counterparts.