The Singapore Venture Workshop with Martin Lear, Anuj Khanna Sohum, and William Klippgen – 6 Dec

The third edition of The Singapore Venture Workshop will be held in NUS next Tuesday. The topic will be: “What You Need to Know to Successfully Raise Money for a Tech Start-Up”. Martin Lear of BioLynx Technologies will speak on “Funding a Biotech start-up in Singapore”, Anuj Khanna Sohum of Affle Group will talk about  ”How to raise several Million dollars for a mobile media company”, and William Klippgen of BAF Spectrum will talk about “What investors look at when making investment decisions”. Read more

Entrepreneur reality show Angel’s Gate, airing 6th Feb, sees $500k investment offer

Updated: 2nd February, 2012

If you’re a big fan of shows like Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank where venture capitalists gobble up clueless entrepreneurs on TV, then you’ll love this one.

Angel’s Gate, Asia’s very own version of such entrepreneur programs, is set to air next Monday (6th February) on Channel NewsAsia at 8pm Singapore time. Ash Singh, founder and CEO of InteractiveSG, which produced the show, revealed that the judges have offered a deal of as much as half-a-million on the program.

No reality show is complete without auditions. For Angel’s Gate, the auditions come in the form of elevator pitches. Quite literally, entrepreneurs enter an elevator where an angel investor stands waiting, and they have only 30 seconds to impress or go home.

One such entrepreneur who passed the test is Chee Yen Lim, CEO of Micropoint Technologies. His product is a drug delivery needle so small that it’s invokes no pain when pressed on a person’s skin. He made the ultimate sacrifice — by demonstrating it on himself.

Chee is appearing on the first episode of the show.

Another entrepreneur that will make an appearance is John Fearon, founder of DropMySite.com (see product feature), the audition was a true Mother-of-God, nerve-wrecking experience. He told me that his mind was a total blank when he went into the elevator, and he had to rely on his countless rehearsals to get the pitch done.

“The cameras in the elevator made it a different experience,” he said.

Read more

Kidlander.sg is First in Series of Southeast Asia Wiki Guides to Kids-Friendly Places and Events

Fresh from securing the LiveJournal Southeast Asia deal, digital publishing house Tickled Media has now launched a new site around kids. Kidlander.sg, a wiki-style guide to places and events for kids in Singapore, joins the company’s portfolio of portals including their flagship parenting site, TheAsianParent.com, as well as localized versions in Philippines, India and Malaysia. Read more

Pitching To Angels On TV With The Angel’s Gate

The Angel’s Gate is a 360-degree reality series that gives aspiring entrepreneurs the opportunity of a lifetime to pitch their dream business ideas to some of Asia’s most successful investors. Cutting across TV, web and mobile, this reality show will broadcast regionally and go live in September 2011. Entrepreneurs can expect to pitch, answer any questions the Angels might have, and maybe even walk away with an investment offer – all filmed on video for broadcast. Read more

PropertyGuru Gets S$5M Line Of Credit

Property search portal PropertyGuru has gotten a SGD 5M (USD 4M) line of credit from “a large Singaporean investment management group”. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its expansion plans which can be drawn down “at short notice if and when required, at extremely favourable market terms”.

This is the first financing since PropertyGuru’s Series A funding from Steven Diggle, the manager of ArtTradis, one of Asia’s largest hedge funds; Upstream Ventures’ Hellmut, Pierre and Carmelo; Tigris Capital; and Finn Evdemon Capital Partners almost 3 years ago.

The last year has seen PropertyGuru’s parent company, AllProperty Media expand and is now operating across 7 countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, India, Australia and Macau. This was done via new operations, acquisitions and strategic partnerships.

In Singapore last August, PropertyGuru also went into the commercial real estate space with CommercialGuru.

ProperyGuru’s paying agent subscriber base has also increased by 85% over the last 12 months to 13,000 and traffic has more than doubled to approximately 4 million users viewing 48 million pages every month.

Referral Marketing Startup Anafore Raises Seed Round From BAF Spectrum, Skype Co-Founder Toivo Annus

Referral marketing startup Anafore has just secured their first round of seed financing from BAF Spectrum, engineering co-founder of Skype Toivo Annus, and SPRING SEEDS Capital – a wholly owned subsidiary of SPRING Singapore that co-invests in local start-ups. Read more

Social Media Monitoring Space Heats Up As Attentio Opens Asia HQ in Singapore

Belgium-based social media monitoring service provider Attentio has just set up a Singapore office to act as their Asia headquarters. Attentio will be providing more competition to other social media monitoring companies with a local presence like ThoughtBuzz, Brandtology and Jamiq.

Founded back in 2004, Attentio can claim to be the oldest of the lot and possibly with the most global traction. In their company write-up, clients listed include big firms like Microsoft, Skype, Toyota, Club Med, Johnson & Johnson, Nokia, Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Buenavista International/Disney. Read more

Progeniq Gets Series A, Engineering Co-Founder of Skype Participates

It last raised pre-series A funds from BAF Spectrum with the participation of SPRING SEEDS Capital Pte Ltd two years ago. This time, Progeniq raises Series A funding led by BAF Spectrum, Ambient Sound Investments and SPRING SEEDS Capital.

William Klippgen, Executive Director of BAF Spectrum and Margus Uudam, Managing Director of Ambient Sound Investments, will both join Progeniq’s board of directors. Read more

Ten Ways to Survive the Crunch

Any economic downturn makes start-up companies in particular prone to go bust – so then, let’s hear advice from a start-up insider and investor on how to prepare to keep young companies afloat. William Klippgen , the co-founder and executive director of the Singapore seed investment fund BAF Spectrum Pte Ltd will share with you ten ways on how to survive the credit crunch. Read more

PropertyGuru Takes The Frustration Out Of Property Search In Singapore

Looks like the online property search market is heating up once again. PropertyGuru is a new entrant in this crowded industry but has already built up a database of 20,000 properties for users to search through. It targets users who are both looking to rent or buy/sell. Read more