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Regular readers of this blog will know of the Entrepreneur27 Singapore initiative started by myself last year. We return this Feb 15 (next Thursday) with our 4th edition titled “You Are the Media”. Ahh yeah, I know, we “borrowed” that from the Time magazine folks.

I want to thank Ridzuan from NTU who has blogged a “5 Reasons why you should come…” kind of pitch for us, hence saving my work for marketing. =) He’s not the only guy and I want to thank the other bloggers for helping the word of mouth effort. Hat-tip to U-Zyn too at Ping.sg. We have 130+ signups since we started the wiki early this week. 70 more spaces to go, guys. Cant resist a commercial pitch here..

Sign up here (no entry fee). More on event here.

This time round, we have a better-planned unconference with 3 concurrent tracks. I pray it works and attendees find the range of sessions useful and not disruptive. We continue to unearth the more exciting Web2.0 startups in little Singapore, those with crazy ideas that should really sink or swim, as evaluated in front of our live audience. There’s no better way to crash-test your business model in front of the actual consumers themselves — young university students and bored young professionals with lots of free time spent surfing the web at home, in dorms and in offices. If you are keen to sharpen your sense of wit and sarcasm and practise your VC analytical skills, come sit in. Its really kinda like American Idol where the audience members are all Simon Cowells, Randy Jacksons and Paula Abduls.

Then there’s always the user-generated sessions which grants you a podium to speak freely and get your 15-30minutes of facetime in front of an audience. Talk about anything you want as long as its relevant to web2.0. Like whether Youtube is an one-off startup opportunity, whether Internet TV is a misnomer due to bandwidth issues, how to identify and find good PHP/ Django programmers, how to design a better widget, tricks to make loads of Adsense money or building the nest big thing blah blah… Eclectic topics and equally eccentric personalities is what we like. Sometimes, the crazy ideas help us get our best thinking done.

The final track is a new creation. Called “branded conversations”, we hope to let the corporates eat the E27 pie too and talk to our audience. In Singapore especially, our fledgling Web 2.0 industry means most of the subject matter experts with industry experience work for someone else now rather than for themselves. So, we hope to bring these people to share some frontline stories of battling with real customers, industry partners and share their strategic viewpoints from within their corporations. We think its also a good chance for entrepreneurs to have a direct line to talk partnering with the biggies without the hassle of calling contacts and scheduling. Join in the pre-event chatter now at SgEntrepreneurs here. The $500M Interactive Digital Media (IDM) fund guys from MDA will also be around to chat.

If you dig Web 2.0, what are you waiting for? Did i mention free dinner too if u come early? But dun leave till you contribute.

This one is for the geeks of Singapore. “Those who code shall rule the world” appears to be the mantra that drives many other Barcamps around the world. In Singapore, we might be late to jump on this bandwagon but we are coming there.

Harish lamented the lack of geeks at the Barcamp event. I agree. I might not be a geek but I do know what Barcamp is not - another event for business types like myself. We need diversity of social events for the coders, hackers and all forms and shapes of Read the rest of this entry »

Presumptious me suggested MDA was wrong even before they officially launched their new $500M fund at the IDM Jamboree. Fearful I will end up with mud on my face, I bravely went for the event but nothing I saw made me change my mind. The event is ripe for an “Extreme Makeover” series featuring event launches of govt initatives.

My friend Justin has a terrific, blow-by-blow, review of the event here.. Great for those of you who did not go. Like he said, government agencies seem to love keywords. Short of plastering Web 3.0 over the entire auditorium, they relied on new catchphrases invented by their own staff (?), such as the initiatives of “i.Rock”, “i.Jam”, FutureScape”, “Flagship2B”. I think I came away feeling more stupid after the event because I don’t understand these terms at all. That gnawing buzz in my head told me it might be due to the painful need to read the wordy, mambo-jumbo description that came with those buzzwords. Like what many people including myself think of those hip-hop wannabes in PAP, I will say the same thing to MDA — Don’t act cool. Thats poserish.

For many of the online community that wondered whether the words Web 3.0 was coined by SGEntrepreneurs, the answer came from the event MC of the panel discussion called “Interactive Markets and Trends”. He held up Seraja.com as an example of a startup with a business model that he introduces as a Web3.0 startup. Now, I heard this myself, along with almost a hundred other people in this panel discussion. Someone might have the video, if we want to do some digital forensics study of this. Read the rest of this entry »

Riding on my “Tomorrow-ed” post earlier, also here, some good friends of mine, Chandra and his linuxNUS community and Ming Yeow, from The Digital Movement, are going to launch the first-ever BarCamp Singapore meetup on Jan 20. I thought its time for private folks like us to step away from the government loudspeakers and propaganda machine for a while to think deeply within our own circles and focus on building real products. Hence my shameless pitch here.

For those clueless on what BarCamp is,

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference 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.

All attendees should give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall. Presenters are responsible for making sure that notes/slides/audio/video of their presentations are published on the web for the benefit of all and those who can’t be present.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

Barcamp is one of many community events run by and for programmers and all other geeks in Silicon Valley. The concept has been replicated in many other countries around the world and you can find out more by clicking here. Other examples include SuperHappyDev House. I am not a programmer so my knowledge runs shallow. But for programmers in Singapore who have not succumbed to the doom and gloom of senior programmers and comp engineers in Singapore’s forlorn IT industry, the BarCamp Singapore initiative might be an eye-opener to passionate folks within our little red dot of an island. At these BarCamps, attendees discuss the latest tools and tricks of programming, design, code up fresh new applications on the fly or simply discuss anything that relates to their passion and hobbies. Common conversation centre around the Ruby on Rails, Django, MySQL or the other fascinating open-source stuff that I have lost track of but are all might cool. Call them naive or passionate, but come join us and get ready to contribute and share.

For interested folks, go to the BarCamp wiki and learn more before you sign up. Its a very attendee-driven event. The program is literally what you make of it. Thats what we call an unconference. =)

Update 2: The post-event analysis is up and readable here.

Update: I found Professor Ramesh Jain from UC Irvine, CA, who might be attending this event too as a presenter of his startup, Event Web. Check out Ramesh Jain’s blog. More on his startup idea here (no website available, it seems). More on the man here.

This event, held Jan 10, will launch an initiative to launch Web 3.0 in Singapore. Frankly, I don;t know how we skipped the evolution cycle because Web 2.0 did not even start in Singapore’s IT and media industries. More on this event at SGEntrepreneurs. I cannot find the actual event site. Looks like this Web3.0 event launch is neither search optimized nor browsable on the website of MDA, the lead agency spearheading this effort. tsk tsk..

And I left a comment on the SGE site which i will reproduce here, in an edited version. As a disclaimer, I am not yet an active practitioner nor entrepreneur in the web industry. But I think I have the right to at least air my opinion on this issue. I am passionate about the Web industry and bullish about the internet medium on business and society and am willing to support any initiative that will propagate its growth. I take issue with the manner of the latest launch by MDA and its affiliated agencies and just prefer to make my thoughts heard in the hope that it lands in the right hands/ ears and we do this initiative right.

“there’s no such thing called “web 3.0″ yet. i am attending this event to see just how the govt defines web 2.0 before we attempt to jump the whole world and create this fictitious web 3.0. Even the website of the event is a joke. its so web 1.0 and they still use antiquated terms of no relevance to the subject matter.

This event almost looks like another initiative by some harried civil servant who pulled together a bunch of kakis from the other ministries to show the whole world they are all collectively putting effort in doing something that meets their KPI/ ROI/ whatever. Yes, a bureaucratic kneejerk reaction is what this looks like.

I rant alot here, i know, but the way the government is trying to launch this fund shows they are simply out of touch in trying to understand what really matters in trying to spur innovation here. those who will create any web3.0 already exist. And i think none of these people are inspired enough by the promise of what this web 3.0 can do to them. I might be jumping the gun before i even attend this event but i will seek to offer some suggestions to improve as as an event precursor.

For starters, dun get government to push it. Get industry leaders, academics, foreign thought leaders from technological hubs in israel, silicon valley to speak at fund launches like this. If the govt has 500 million to spend eventually, they can spend a few million trying to do this right for once by flying the right people down to Singapore to launch this. Get any warm body the innovators, the engineers, the entrepreneurs, will respect, NOT govt officials. Unless this is an internal fund for only civil servants to create startups, no one in the audience is going to listen to some civil servants step up that podium and subsequently gladly oblige to follow the commands. Singapore’s culture may be paternalistic but all kids grow up eventually.

I don;t know whether this fund’s creators actually pondered the root to the lack of innovation here which is why we have no notable web 2.0 enterprises of note. The real problem is the engineers and comp science students in singapore flocking to the more financially stable industries of Finance and Banking. Without real efforts put into university admin and policies that effectively overcome the sociological and psychological bias of our nation’s brightest engineers against non-financial careers, this initiative is dead in the water before it starts. This is the real brain drain a fictional Web 3.0 industry in Singapore will face. And this is a chronic cancer no cure seems imminent at present. We need to make this industry more glamorous and credible. Which does not mean more lame advertising campaigns depicting the computing industry as sexy or anything. It means putting more money into the promising startups we already have, helping them hire good talent from local and especially overseas etc…

More importantly, we need to inspire and fertilize the ground which grows those entrepreneurs, ie. the schools. We need to find what ever minor successes we have in the current generation of web entrepreneurs we have in Singapore and cultivate them as role models through the media. Talk about their struggles, their successes and the route they took to success so others can take note and support can be rallied from society and the industry. Influencing the public is key here anda successful push in the Web industry will help greatly in expanding career options to students in the educational institutions in polys ITEs, and the unis.

THe only web “successes” we have so far is? I might be ignorant but only HArdwarezone.com came to mind and they were bought for a paltry SG$7 million. how is that going to inspire any potential local web3.0 entrepreneur to start up? I think this is a question begging to be asked. 500 million from the govt coffers might be huge, but it will not displace the importance nor influence of the VC industry which will be begging to ask whether any future valuations of startups in this region deserve funding after the HWZ precedent.”

Follow-up: For those frustrated with the development of Singapore’s web industry, help it grow at the BarCamp SG event on Jan 20.

Singapore has this new initiative with an objective of bridging the digital divide. In a cose parallel to the free-Wifi initiative in Mountain View, Singapore will launch a nationwide Wifi network that provides wireless online access for free over a two-year period. For more, read this GigaOm post or this..

This post was supposed to be a review of my first usage of this service. It was first launched on December 1st but well, I have wireless at home and free wireless in my NUS campus, so I didn’t caretill now.

So i tried signing up for it today, under the iCell network cos I heard icell and QMax have simpler signup procedures than Singtel based on media reports. So i tried doing what anyone else will do for a newbie.

I search for “icell singapore” with Google. No relevant result. Strange..

So i tried “wireless@sg singapore” instead, half-expecting it to direct me to a main site that will offer me direct access to all three providers and a list of locations where I can find the limited locations offering this service. No relevant result too. I reached an IDA web page, which was broken, and referred me to another site before i had to click on another button to reach the proper-signup page i was looking for.

Its not easy so far, I thought.. I didn’t imagine that the providers and the man Wireless@SG program had no dedicated Google presence in our world today. Just how will someone who is less web-savvy than me use this service? And I am not even a computer science student.. I wonder how my dad, mum, or uncle will use this. They will probably start off with a search engine too..

But its fine, I found the highly embedded Wireless@SG site, i thought, so i can finally sign up for my freebies.. But heck no..

Icell requires you to provide compuksory information such as your NRIC no, a personal identification number and your full name, your cell phone number and that totally put me off signing up. Last thing I want is icell spamming my cell phone with SMSes when Singtel, a proper telco, already does so. And why the hell do they always want NRICs? I hate giving that info out and it seems all Singapore websites love doing that. Dun they realise that is a conscious mental barrier for web users when we dun have to provide our NRICs when we sign up for foreign-based services like email, blog account, etc? It makes me ever more conscious that some governmetn agency will track my personal information and tracking habits. This “walled-garden”aproach of differentiating Singapore-based internet services from foreign ones is a needless hassle.

I went over to Singtel’s wireless@SG site. Since I was a Singtel customer, i could sign up easily by just text-messaging them. But i remembered all the personal privacy concerns and red flags from my icell experience and decided not to support this initiative that seemed to be founded on the wrong service development premises. I was also miffed that you cannot find the locations easily that provide the limited version of Wireless@SG services now.

Granted that its only been two weeks since the limited launch, these teething problems may come to pass, but as an early adopter, I am rather put off by my experience thus far. And i hear from my friends that you have to download a program before you can use the Wireless@SG service, that is dumb. I rather use the plug and play free wireless from McDonalds’ anytime over this.

This is another poor example of customer service in Singapore that threatens to derail this wonderful initiative at first. I would think you need to be rather savvy with the computer to use Wireless@SG services, so isn’t this service widening the digital divide ever more?

I am *bleeping* starstuck after meeting the two space travellers today.

I was invited to the CNN Future Summit taping at the Esplanade in Singapore and had the privilege to be in the same room with Anousheh Ansari and Buzz Aldrin, 1st female space tourist and 2nd man on the moon respectively.. I am still in a mild state of amazement after meeting these icons of human space travel. Its been my dream since i was really young to travel to the stars and today, I think i got the closest I have ever been. To go any closer will require me to strike paydirt and pay that $200,000 for a Virgin Galactic ticket.

I managed to be the only guy who asked a question to this panel of luminaries, that includes Ian Pearson, futurologist at British Telecom and Lino Guzzella who’s a real innovator in hydrogen fuel cell technologies. The whole event is essentially an awesome publicity stunt by Singapore Tourism Board to drum up buzz for the upcoming spaceport. I hate to leak out details of the show before its first screening at 6pm Singapore time on the CNN channel. All i can say now is that Buzz Aldrin’s really conservative and “old-guard-ish” while Ansari is full of entrepreneurial enthusiasm on what our generation can do to make space flight even more accessible. And I am trying to figure out how I can record my first appearance on internation television. Darn, I forgot to mention my name and NUS affiliation, haha..

All in all an amazing week for me, after my invitation to George Bush’s talk in Singapore. That caps 3 major international celebrities and makes for a climatic end to my university education. I am gonna reserve some of my thoughts on this event till after the show’s screening.

Related post: A Spaceport for Singapore

Following in the illustrious footsteps of Dawn Yang & Daphne Teo, Wee Shu Min enters this exclusive Singapore club of “Technorati Chart-Toppers”.

For my uninitiated readers, Wee Shu Min is an 18-year old high school student and is also a blogger. She happens to be the daughter of a local politician and is perceived to have an elite and cloistered upbringing, Her recent blog post, that was written last week in response to a middle-class 35-year old blogger’s rants against the competitive culture of Singapore, was deemed to be overly acerbic and sparked an online, and offline, controversy over the elite-middle class divide in Singapore.

For an overview to clue yourself in on this, click here.

But I also like to recommend you to watch this machinima summary of the whole saga, friggin’ good effort
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtavgfcZrvs&eurl=]

More on this brewing saga can be found on these blogs; BenDecidesToBlog, XenoBoySg, Kitana.

Some people ask why Singaporeans have such an outcry over such a trivial issue of a high school kid exercising her freedom of speech, well to that, I say that Singaporeans are not used to having freedom of expression, save for the internet and the blogosphere. There’s always a ying-yang balance in the universe, in Singapore, the counter-acting force happens to be the blogosphere since our mainstream media sector is underdeveloped (see Rank #147).

And the latest quote of the Year?

From: Singabloodypore

For more comics and related content, click here for IntelligentSingaporean.

“Many of the politicians don’t actually understand the phenomenon of the Internet very well,” Schmidt told the Financial Times. “It’s partly because of their age … often what they learn about the Internet they learn from their staffs and their children.”

The advent of television taught political leaders the art of the sound bite. The Internet will also force them to adapt.

“The Internet has largely filled a role of funding for politicians … but it has not yet affected elections. It clearly will,” Schmidt said.

Writing in the Sun tabloid, the Google boss said the online world has empowered ordinary people with the ability to challenge governments, the media and business.

“It has broken down the barriers that exist between people and information, effectively democratising access to human knowledge,” Schmidt wrote.

“This has made us much more powerful as individuals.”

~~Larry Eric Schimdt, Chairman & CEO of Google

Very true. I love this excerpt so much so that I have decided to put it up here. Full article available here. Some of the older generation really dun get it. They think of the internet as a “series of tubes”. Check out my rant about Senator Ted Stevens here. Some clamp down on internet, thinking they are subversive to society.

Its fine setting up parameters of decency on the internet, but don’t fight technology for the sake of safeguarding positions of power but rather in granting a voice to the masses. The little man needs a voice. Governments should learn how to play a role in the new medium rather than ignore it or condemn it as a channel for subversive social behavior. And they should not learn to play a dominant role, as they are used to in the offline world, but learn to understand their new status as equals.

Such mindset changes are most difficult to implement relative to material changes in our physical world. In my country Singapore, politics has become a science privy only to a gated, niche community. Mindset changes at both government and the civil level are needed in order to truly open up socially perceived barriers to public dialogue.

Don’t close the door on the Internet.

George Yeo finally came out of the fog of the old media and is now a blogger. Well, make that a guest blogger under Ephraim Loy’s blog here. For the clueless, George is the current Foreign Minister of Singapore and his previous web presence, other than coverage of his official speeches on the national newspapers, belonged to the domain of political satire under TalkingCock.com , a local humor site poking fun at local politicians.

Here’s an excerpt from his recent post on the Singapore Idol:

[Singapore Idol]
1. It was fun being there when the results were announced. The crowd had a good time. Some stood up to rock to the music.

2. Singapore being Singapore, there were sensitivities. Having only come back from New York that morning, I did not know that the dark blue shirt I wore indicated support for Hady. Lucas Chow, the CEO of MediaCorp, who was dressed in a white jacket, said he would ‘balance’ me since white was for Jonathan. I was given two clappers, one white and one blue, to be politically correct. Boy, sometimes I wish I weren’t a minister.

3. But I did observe the audience critically to see whether the support for Hady and Jonathan was divided along ethnic lines. I was glad to learn later that the results showed a decisive 70% win for Hady, meaning that many Chinese Singaporeans voted for him. He had the better voice although I thought Jonathan had stronger stage presence. My wife said he had the Korean K-pop look. But the murmurs persist in social conversations. Some say that Hady received support from JB which I find hard to believe. One Chinese friend said that we can’t have Malays winning every time. Well, this is multi-racial Singapore. Anyway, 70% is much better than my 56% win in Aljunied.

I must say I am proud that George Yeo is somewhat of a trailblazer in adopting new media compared to his colleagues, considering that he’s my local representative for the Parliament. This should at least score him some brownie points. Although I feel he should get his own blog instead of co-blogging with Ephraim whose style is simply jarring with george’s style. His blogging style is refreshing honest and personal and definitely steered clear of the sanitized, PR-filtered mambo-jumbo the national media has been feeding the public.

Its time to show more personal character, so you go, George!