BL: Hi Ross, great to have you here on SGE. Tell us about your background. What did you do before setting up wego.com?
Ross Veitch: Thanks Bernard for the opportunity to talk with you.

As a kid growing up in Bendigo, Australia I was a bit of geek with an early interest in computers and bulletin boards. At age 18 I went off traveling and ended up in London working in factories and bars until I realized that my old computer skills were enough to land a series of jobs in the trading rooms of London banks. Back in Sydney a couple years later I worked at Tourism Australia, initially as a number crunching Strategic Analyst/Planner and then as Internet Strategist where I worked on the first australia.com site. In 1998 Yahoo! hired me to come to Singapore to setup operations for Yahoo! Southeast Asia and to manage the production and engineering teams which I did for 6 years until 2003.

During my time at Yahoo! I was exposed to the travel meta-search business through Yahoo!’s acquisition of two companies in the space; FareChase in the US and Kelkoo in Europe. I thought the product was extremely compelling from a consumers point of view and that Asia was well suited to the price comparison model because of the highly fragmented nature of most Asia-Pacific travel markets compared to those in the US or Europe. Bringing travel meta-search to Asia was one of several ideas I had on a list of possible “Life after Yahoo!” projects.

Around the same time my present day business partner, Craig Hewett was working at InterContinental Hotels Group running eCommerce for Asia-Pacific and through his exposure to the fast growing US meta-searchers was having much the same idea as I was. I mutual friend who knew we were both thinking about the space brought us together. At the time I was in the middle of taking a year off to travel, trying to get fit and lying on the couch reading. Craig talked me into getting off the couch and to getting involved with him in what became Bezurk.com. Some time later when Craig and I realised we needed adult supervision we were fortunate to have Martin Symes who had extensive experience in online travel and with building organizations, join us as CEO.

BL: Before wego.com, we understand that it was called Bezurk.com, how did the name change come about?
Ross Veitch: Bezurk as a brand had a number of challenges associated with it, not least of which was that most people had trouble remembering how to spell it. Also, if english is not your first language, as is the case for a large majority of our target audience, then it is difficult to remember at all because the word probably doesn’t mean anything to you.

Because of these difficulties we decided to rebrand prior to kicking off our consumer marking efforts. The calculus was basically that it would cost way more to build up ‘Bezurk’ as a brand than it would to acquire the domain wego.com, rebrand, and market “Wego” as a brand. So we switched from Bezurk.com to Wego.com

BL: Can you briefly tell us about wego.com and what does it do for the consumers?
Ross Veitch: Wego.com is an online comparison shopping service for flights, hotels, rental cars, packages and other travel products. We help consumers save both time and money when booking travel by quickly searching 100+ different travel websites on behalf of the user and showing the prices available at each so the user can find the best possible deal. Importantly we show both the supplier direct pricing from the airlines and hotel chains as well as the best deals you can get via a travel agent or aggregator website. We’re sometimes referred to as a travel meta-search engine and sometimes as a travel search engine (TSE).

BL: What are the three most interesting features on wego.com that you like users to know about?
Ross Veitch: Real-time filters and sliders. After searching 100+ websites for a given query it’s not uncommon for us to return thousands of different products and price points which would normally be completely unmanageable. Fortunately Wego provides a set of filters and sort options that let you quickly zoom in of the best flight or hotel option. e.g. You can adjust a price slider to show only hotel rooms between S$100-$200 or only flights departing before 12noon or only hotels where you will get Starwood Rewards Points. These handy tools are all built with AJAX so the results set can be quickly manipulated in the browser without having to refresh the whole page each click.

Hot Deals Newsletter Singapore readers should check out and subscribe to our weekly newsletter which is a compilation of all the best travel deals that we’ve seen each week. Because we work with all the major players in the Asian travel industry and spend all day searching their websites for deals we are in a very good position to know about hot deals the minute they break. Our weekly newsletter actually started life as an occasionally email we’d circulate internally and to friends and family to alert them to particularly good deals.

Wego Hotels Guest Satisfaction Index To help users decide which hotel to book we recently added a Wego Guest Satisfaction score for each hotel that we search. This score is calculated based on semantic and sentiment analysis of hotel reviews and opinions from across the web. That is, we analyze what a user is talking about in their comments, how strongly the sentiments are expressed and then we roll it all up statistically into the one number. We have some very cool new features in the pipeline that further extend these concepts.

BL: How does wego.com deliver value to the consumers who are interested to source for travel deals?
Ross Veitch: Wego helps users save time, save money and make smarter decisions when shopping for travel.

BL: There are both direct and indirect competitors, for e.g. travel search engines which focuses on large domestic markets in China and India or indirect competitors like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. How does wego distinguish itself from them?
Ross Veitch: Wego actually powers travel search services for both Yahoo! and Microsoft in Asia and as you would imagine, they are very important partners for us. We also have a healthy relationship with Google to whom we provide travel feeds that they use to enhance their Maps and Local products.

There is a basic chicken and egg issue involved in getting a travel meta-search business off the ground. You need content partnerships with all the big travel companies to offer users a compelling product but to get the travel companies interested you need a critical mass of users in markets that the travel companies want to reach. Our solution to this dilemma has been to partner with the large portals in order to bring the critical mass of traffic and to adopt a multi-market regional approach such that we can always offer a travel company an audience that is attractive to them. This strategy has worked quite nicely so far.

BL: How does wego.com generate revenues to sustain itself?
Ross Veitch: Wego’s primary business model is very similar to that of Google’s search business in that we get paid referral fees, a ‘Cost-per-Click’ (CPC), by the travel suppliers that we refer users to.

You will also see display advertising placed throughout our site which we sell primarily to the larger travel brands but also to an increasing number of non-travel advertisers such as banks, credit card companies and luxury goods marketers, who are wanting to reach an online savvy audience with high disposable income.

Like many consumer web sites we’re also plugged into the Google ecosystem with an additional source of revenue coming from their Adsense for Search program which places relevant text ads next to our organic search results.

Finally we also get paid by licensing and integration fees by companies and organizations who license our travel search platform and have it customized so it can be offered to their own users as part of their own website.

BL: What are the major challenges that you have encountered while you were writing the story for wego.com for the past few years?
Ross Veitch: Start-ups are messy by their nature and this is particularly true when it’s your first starup as this was for both Craig and I. Without getting into all the details it’s fair to say we made more than our fair share of mistakes early on that ended up costing us a lot of time, money and effort to resolve later on.

Due to the time it took us to clean up some of the early mistakes eluded to above, we ended up having to personally fund the business for a lot longer than we had originally planned before going out to raise external funding. This put considerable pressure on Craig, Martin and I as we had a staff of about 20 by then. This was a very stressful period but in retrospect was beneficial in that the business was a lot more mature by the time we eventually did our investor roadshow and as a result we were able to secure a higher valuation and better quality of investor than we probably would have if we’d gone out earlier. It all got a bit touch and go there for a while though!

BL: What are the three most important traits of an entrepreneur?
Ross Veitch: It sounds cliché but determination to succeed (however you personally measure that) and a genuine passion for whatever it is you are trying to do are what I think are probably the most important traits for an entrepreneur to have.

Without the determination to keep going and stay focused there are no shortage of obstacles, set-backs or distractions that will prevent you from achieving whatever it is you originally set out to do.

Having a passion for what you are doing makes doing it day after day a whole easier than if it’s just a job. That’s not to say that it’s any easier just that it’s a lot more interesting and sometimes fun. Most importantly if you don’t have passion for what you’re doing then you’re unlikely to inspire the best people to work for you, to partner with you or purchase from you. Passion is infectious and is critical ingredient for any startup.

Of course being smart, having a good idea, a well developed network, ready access to funding and supply of talented employees don’t hurt either but I suspect these are all of only secondary importance in determing the ultimate success or failure of a venture.

As a final thought I recommend that any tech entrepreneurs check out the writings of Paul Graham, Guy Kawasaki and Marc Cuban, all of whom offer great advice for anybody contemplating a startup.

The Singapore Python Group is organizing the 4th Singapore Python User Group Meeting. The meeting will be held on Thursday, July 16, 2009, from 7:00pm – 9:00pm in SMU, SIS (School of Information System) NSR 2.1.

Programme:

* DigiBanner : An Interactive Multi-Screen Network Application – Mr. Morgan Heijdemann
* Using Google Application Engine and Amazon Web Services Together – Dr. Chris Boesch
* Python User Group updates – Dr. Liew Beng Keat
* Lightning talks – Open Invitation. (Come on and share what you have been doing…)
* Snacks and Tea

This is until the introduction of Xero, which was founded in July 2006 by technology entrepreneur Rod Drury and specialist small business accountant Hamish Edwards. Xero is now listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange and it has become a fast growing company.

Xero is an online accounting system designed for small businesses and their advisors and it works!

Xero offers numerous useful features such as expense claims, budgeting, accounts watch list and bank accounts summaries, all presented graphically in nice diagrams to show you all the important numbers regarding your money.

At the heart of Xero is a full accrual accounting system which automates and simplifies day-to-day bookkeeping. Also, due to the web-based nature of the software, the user can access his accounts and run their business from anywhere in the world. Trusted advisers can log in and view the user’s accounts, providing valuable real-time advice.

This software is not free though, but costs a mere $49 New Zealand Dollar per month to use and as a business idea, Xero gets 5 stars, not just for the money making idea but for the flawless execution that turns a complicated and laborious task into a fun one.

As the boss of Macrohard, I must admit that my software engineers are unable produce such nifty software.

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).

Design your own Unconference experience. The breakout sessions give you the chance to exchange ideas and opinions with IDM enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and professionals. This is your chance to have your say and voice your ideas! Let us know what you want to see discussed. Simply click the edit button at the top of the page and write your ideas and suggestions. We’ll be happy to work it in. The event will be on 12th July 2008 from 11.30 am to 6 pm. The venue will be in Matrix @ Biopolis, 30 Biopolis Street, Singapore 138671 and the tickets are sold at $10 with buffet lunch and drinks provided. For more information, go to their main page here.

Zopim is a company incubating under Garag3 from NUS that helps improve your visitors’ experience on your website. Their product enables your visitors and clients to stay in touch with you through your website, using the most convenient form of communication, instant messages. Of course, they have a larger than life story on how they got started. So, we managed to lock Julian Low and his fellow team mates in the Zopim team (Wenxiang, Royston Tay, Yang Bin) for an interview to tell us about ZopIM.

BL: Hi Julian, thank you for the interview. Tell us about your background.
Julian:Hi Bernard, for the interview, with your permission I would like to include the rest of my core team in this interview as ZopIM is our baby and I feel they too deserved the recognition for all their efforts.

A very brief background of the team is as follows:

Wenxiang is ZopIM’s server side developer & residential punk who despite having a rebellious streak, labors day and night, tweaking away to ensure that everything runs smoothly at ZopIM. Graduating from the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Computer Engineering, WX’s thesis involves advanced customer profiling solutions which is integrated into ZopIM as a very useful tool for ZopIM users to track and understand their visitors’ web path and behavior.

Royston previously honed his engineering skills as a QA/software engineer at FaceTime Communications Inc, a leading company in Enterprise IM security. He helped developed internal stress and monitoring tools, and was involved in some technical marketing as well.

At ZopIM, he is now heavily involved in developing the web-based interface for ZopIM’s corporate customers and also chips in for Business Dev as the official Business Dude

Yang Bin aka YB is ZopIM’s Client & Agent side developer and is also our resident Javascript ninja. A coding masochist, YB has outlasted his peers in coding marathons and at last check, has not left his cubicle since. A gaming enthusiast, YB is the co-founder of Fragnetics.com, one of Singapore’s very successful game hosting companies.

Majoring in Life Sciences, I was previously employed as an intern at Alpha Innotech Corporation based in San Leandro, California. I worked my way to Junior Product Manager and was handling multiple product lines before I left them last summer.

During my stint in Silicon Valley, I was given the opportunity to be part of a 2-man startup company called NandoDrop Array Technologies. ND-array Technologies was a company that was aiming to commercialize a small molecular drug discovery platform that was developed in NUS by my co-founder and which provides a 96% cost reduction in screening for potential drug targets.
Despite early successes in raising funding from local sources, I was unable to garner serious industry interest in the U.S to realize its full potential, largely due to undercapitalization. Eventual undercapitalization forced us to shut the company down and it was a painful lesson but I would still do it again as I gained many invaluable lessons through it. Many of which had benefited me as I venture forth with ZopIM.com which is also aiming to challenge and optimize existing business practices.

BL: Tell us the story behind ZopIM! and how did the whole team get involved in the project?
Julian: ZopIM like many other startups was an idea borne out of idle conversations. I had roomed in with Wenxiang and was classmates with YangBin when we were in Silicon Valley and we had an idea which goes basically like this: “What if you could have a browser-base chat session that could persist across multiple web pages? What if every hyperlink becomes an opportunity for you to interact with a fellow human being in this extremely populated but still surprisingly quiet place we call the internet.”

This remained an idea until 18th April 2007. That fateful day, Tim Draper the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm had arrived in Singapore for an event and was having a dinner meet up session with local aspiring entrepreneurs. WX who was never invited, gate-crashed the event (with the help of Roy) and shamelessly pitched his idea to Tim. As luck would have it, Tim liked the idea and asked when he could see the prototype.

WX, thinking that Tim was kidding, said: “Two months?”

Tim: “Okay, I want to see the prototype exactly 2 months from now, 18th June in my office. I will arrange a meeting with you with my secretary.”

When WX went home that night and received an email confirmation from Tim’s personal assistant Karen, he practically fell off his chair. That was when all hell broke loose.

Realizing that this was a rare opportunity, WX needed more help and roped in Roy who was eager to get in the fray. Within 2 months, Roy+YB+ WX had ZopIM’s 1st prototype up and we presented it to him at his Sandhilll office in Silicon Valley.

Like most VCs, he did not reject us outright but basically told us that he thinks the idea is scalable and that we were to approach when we gain some traction. Despite this, Tim’s encouragement gave us the impetus to continue developing on the idea. Though we were still schooling, we had successfully applied and obtained funding from MDA’s iJam’s program and the rest as they say is history.

BL: As we understand that ZopIM is a next generation sales Instant Messaging platform, how is it different from the remote desktop types of messaging platforms which are available? Also, what are the features in ZopIM! that you deemed interesting for your users?
Julian: Live Chat for customer sales and support is not new. However the industry is filled with cloned solutions that just do not satisfy the needs of small online businesses. If you take a simple Google search and download the ready-made Live Chat solutions today, you’ll find that most are them are:

• a. Cumbersome to use and requiring software downloads.
• b. Have bad user interface design.
• c. Costly and not applicable for small online businesses

ZopIM differentiates itself from the rest of the market by focusing a lot of our developmental energies in solving the pains our customers as well as the end-customer (their customers). You can see this in the features that we offer like…

• a. Offline notifications/messaging and a browser-based Dashboard platform that help our customers talk to people on their websites even while they are on the not near a computer. We believe we are the first Live Chat service provider to offer this for now. (If you do find one, do let us know)
• b. Incorporating business features like customer ranking, canned messages and survey functions that help our customers to engage their web page visitors more efficiently and effectively.

Currently, we are still working on the pricing model with our Beta Clients but one thing we can assure is that it would be a Freemium model where it would be free for most websites till they reach a certain high traffic stage.

BL: Who would be the customers of your product?
Julian: So far, our Beta customers base come in all shapes and sizes. On top of a few Web design & IT firms that deploy our platform, we have a Spa Treatment Website (www.spahaven.com.sg), a Gaming Console Webby (www.qisahn.com), a Bag aficionada cum sales blog (www.cassis-room.blogspot.com) and even a Political Webby (www.voterscentral.com).
However, the one thing that is common among them is that they rely heavily on their websites to reach out and engage their customers.

BL: How does ZopIM! create a sustainable revenue model given that the messaging platform is free and can be deployed on any platform?
Julian: Yes, its free for the majority of our customers. However we will be working on a Freemium model, we will charge our customers an affordable subscription fee when they reach a certain traffic or need more advanced features (e.g SMS notification, intelligent routing, etc).

That way, we can build a sustainable business while providing ZopIM for our beloved customers.

BL: What are the trends that you see in the instant messaging platform space in the web?
Julian: In the social IM space, we see more and more integration and aggregation activities going on. We also see that IM clients which were once mostly desktop-based migrating/merging with the browser. Popular clients like Meebo and Ebuddy are evidence of this. Once dataplans become cheaper and accessible for phones, it’s a no-brainer to postulate that the next Big IM War will happen on the phone.

Ok, what I postulated are boring conclusions that have been debated since the 90s. Personally, I would like to go out on a leg to predict that IM would one day become smarter tools than just a simple text-base medium you see today. I believe very strongly that Netizens one day will use embedded IM tools on the web (like ZopIM) to conduct other activities. (E.g. Book an appointment with your doctor/restaurant, request for information or automate a multitude of online tasks)

BL: What are the three important traits of a young entrepreneur that you think are important?
Julian: Most self-motivational books would tell you that the 3 important traits that an entrepreneurs should have are Courage, Passion and Honesty. However, I would like to propose to SGE’s readers a slightly more non-conventional lesson for young entrepreneurs that we have learnt so far.

Team ZopIM would not be where it is today if not for our Mentor and Friend , Charlie Giang who is a successful entrepreneur in his own right. Through our drinking sessions (where he sponsors our liquor and get us horribly dead drunk), we were able to glean from him a few pearls of wisdom.
Chief among his many advices is that a young entrepreneur MUST have the willingness to “po fu chen zhou“. “Po fu chen zhou” is a Chinese proverb that basically translates to destroying the cooking pots and sinking his boats. The proverb relates to orders an ancient Chinese General Xiang Yu assigned to his army when they landed on enemy shores. The result of the orders hardened his army’s resolve and they were able to defeat their enemy who were numerically bigger and better prepared.

Likewise, a young entrepreneur going into the marketplace should be desperate to succeed. When he/she makes the conscious decision to cut himself off from the comfort of a 9-5 job to fill a gap identified in the market, he has nothing to lose. He/she would naturally have the means to adapt accordingly and to develop other traits (E.g. People skills) as challenges come along.

Thus said, there are no fixed traits or winning formulas any successful entrepreneurs should have. If you wait to develop those traits before you decide to plunge in, it would be too late. When you are young, you have nothing much to lose. So make the plunge today and learn those traits as you go.

BL: Thanks for sharing with your story and thoughts. We wish you and the team from ZopIM the best of luck for your ventures ahead.

1) Virtual World Roundup: Hipihi, Novoking and UOneNet

• Distinguish the virtual worlds: (i) worlds with no purposes – 2nd Life vs (ii) gaming worlds like World of Warcraft which coveted 80% of the market.
• Useful facts and statistics for the news: HiPiHi: 48,000 registered users, NovoKing: 10,000 registered users while UOneNet: <1,000. By comparison, Second Life has 13.5 million “residents.” One thing to note is that all three are still in their private beta.
• Talk about the differences in thinking between US and China virtual world creators: for example, Xu Hui sees the virtual worlds as a 3D version of web browser for the future.
• Virtual world for kids – Penguin Club (http://www.penguinclub.com).
• Commerce on virtual worlds – featuring First Meta (http://firstmeta.com).

2) Interview with Daniel Cerventus Lim.

• Co-founder of Ideapreneur (http://ideapreneur.net).
• Supporting orgasnisation of NetBash – a fringe event at the WCIT.

3) Letters

• Are we too China focused in our content?
• Email you comments / feedback to geekgoddessshow@gmail.com

For more info, do visit our website: http://thegeekgoddess.tv

From our friends across the causeway in Malaysia, an immediate press release to share with all here – Guy Kawasaki, World Renown Author and Venture Capitalist, Speaks at NEF NetBash @ WCIT Kuala Lumpur. Kawasaki and other global experts talks about Web 2.0 and How to Change the World to Malaysian Technopreneurs.

Kuala Lumpur – New Entrepreneur Forum (NEF) has previously organised many NetBashes to discuss ICT business trends, applications and policies that affect Malaysian technopreneurs. The 13th NEF NetBash, jointly organised with the Association of Computer and Multimedia Industry (PIKOM) and Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM), in conjunction with WCIT 2008 Malaysia, was held on 19th May 2008 at Hotel Nikko Kuala Lumpur.

The main speaker at the event was none other than world famous author, speaker and one of Apple’s founders and Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, Guy Kawasaki. He and other notable speakers such as Hollywood Producer and CEO of Rocket Fish Studios, Terry Thoren; Executive General Manager of Al Jazeera’s Children Channel, Mahmoud Bouneb; and, Founder and President of Prosperati and an ex-Googler, Colin Wong, made up the lineup of speakers at NEF NetBash @WCIT.

Web 2.0 is the next evolution of the Internet, and it’s already here. It is a trend to use Internet Technology and Web Design to enhance creativity, share information and more importantly, collaboration among users. The Web is no longer seen as a “source of information” but a source for collaboration and information or application sharing. The question now is “how can Malaysian technopreneurs ride this current wave of Internet business?”

Photo: Jarius Lee, Neil Foster from the Singapore PHP User Group on a photo with Guy Kawasaki and Daniel CerVentus (Malaysia).

This was the primary topic discussed at NetBash, with specific focus on Creative Content, Web 2.0 and the future of new media and Internet businesses. Guy Kawasaki mainly focused his talk on Innovation and Product Development. This is in-line with the theme for this year’s MSC Malaysia’s International Advisory Panel (IAP) meeting, which is “Innovation for Wealth Creation”. The extensive experience and knowledge of the speakers brought global insights and new knowledge to Malaysian technopreneurs.

NetBash @ WCIT was also supported by MCA ICT Resource Centre (MIRC), Ideapreneur.net and Youth Malaysia. The event was also presented through the invaluable support and contribution of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC).