Archive for the ‘Singapore’ Category
Written on August 5, 2008 – 11:44 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember Rollercoaster Tycoon? The addictive game turned you into a theme park manager and rollercoaster designer. Although I enjoyed the managing aspect, the building possibilities really did it for me. One of the options during the construction of a rollercoaster were the boosters, which helped the trains gain some speed.
Social network Friendster is often called a “rollercoaster failure“. It was one of the first popular networks, attracted millions of users, and reached its peak in 2003 - Google then almost bought it for $30 million. Due to scalability problems, MySpace and Facebook took over the Western market. The rollercoaster went down pretty fast.
Yet the next steep was already in sight, as Friendster became the no. 1 service in several South Asian countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.
Earlier today, Friendster passed two boosters, which make the social network an important player again. The company closed a $20 million investment round, led by IDG Ventures with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Founders Fund. Moreover, the San Francisco-based company welcomed a new CEO, Richard Kimber, the regional managing director of South Asia for Google.
So while Facebook and MySpace have their ball in the west, Friendster now has the money and the right guy to firm their good position in South Asia. That’s one hell of a rollercoaster ride…
I hope you like that post!
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Written on March 5, 2008 – 2:34 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This week we’re interviewing Arnout Mostert, a Dutch entrepreneur who lives and works in Singapore. Together with Frank Bomers he founded Conference Bay. This is a service that aims to make visiting, organizing and speaking at conferences a more pleasant experience. They do that by offering innovative online services to conference organizers, delegates and speakers such as an online bidding tool for tickets and an online booking application. They’ll soon launch a speakers section where speakers can create their own profile page.
How did you come up with the idea of Conference Bay?
“When I was working in Marketing for Shell in London during the the late nineties, I got the chance to join a new business that was set up to investigate the opportunities that new media could bring to a company like Shell. I attended quite a few conferences at the time and was amazed how often I would get calls or emails from the organizers offering me the ‘exclusive’ opportunity to bring a colleague for free, which basically is a 50% discount. One day I was sitting at a particularly boring conference and after finishing off the Mentos we sketched the idea for Conference Bay on a napkin. Basically, we borrowed the Priceline model where people can name the price they’re willing to pay for something.” (more…)
Written on February 29, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Young professionals, ambitious students and recruiters who are disappointed in the effectiveness of LinkedIn or Facebook, could look for better times at iHipo.com: ‘the High Potential network dedicated to empowering international careers’. It’s the place for young people with international ambitions to connect with human resource managers who roam the social networks of the world to find talented youngsters.
Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality
The founders, three recent graduates from Germany, the Netherlands and Singapore, believe to follow a globalization trend on the world-wide job market. Arnout Wagenaar: “Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality. Also, people have a growing need to work internationally.”
On iHipo, there are two kinds of profiles: as a business you can post jobs and search for new talent. As a professional, you can search for jobs and friends in your industry. There’s also the Knowledge Base with over 2,000 international HR contacts and interview preparation material. Further features include a Google maps mashup to geographically highlight the iHipo community, a Facebook application and a number of new networking tools.
I guess it must be a struggle to be successful in this job specific area of the web. It’s a niche with hundreds of players, and they’re are all trying to lure young talents into their professional network. Yet iHipo seems to do a pretty good job. The Singaporean company launched in July 2007 and managed to attract close to 1,000 registered users and 160 job offers by international employers in the first week. They were mainly successful in the US and South-East Asia and now plan to expand to Europe.
Well, this week iHipo has received some more capital for their European conquest, since they’ve closed a seed round of funding by Thymos Capital and the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA). And with the latter backing them up, they can face everybody. The MDA are those tough Senior Management rappers you might know from the YouTube video that was viewed more than 200,000 times:
Written on February 7, 2008 – 7:55 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Gen Kanai
This year, LIFT will also organize an Asian edition of the conference. With the session ‘A Glimpse in Asia’, they wanted to warm up the current visitors for LIFT Asia-style. Gen Kanai, a business developer for Mozilla Asia and director of marketing and partner relations for Mozilla Japan, offered an overview of open source in Asia. According to Kanai, there’s a lot to win on the field of open source developing in Asia. He summed up the barriers for open source programmers in Asia:
- Asians have a different style of communicating. They’re not comfortable with the direct way Western people confront each other. According to Kanai, Asians ‘might be intimidated’ when working with people from the West.
- Open Source defacto language is English, so the hurdle for non-native speakers is higher. Also Asian people tend to create islands of groups, such as Mozillagumi.
- In the US and Europe, most programmers work on open source projects after their daytime jobs. Most Asians however, don’t have any free time. Kanai points out that most developers in India work for Western companies and can’t choose how much work they accept.
- Asian open source programmers need institutionalized support.
Despite all the barriers, Kanai urged the attendees to look beyond the stereotypes about Asia. “The continent has contributed to open source”, he said, “Yet we need to do more”. After this visionary speech he couldn’t resist the temptation of promoting Firefox: “Anybody who tells a friend about Firefox, helps the open source community. We can all affect the future of open source”. Next time keep the marketing talk to yourself Kanai, and the applause will be even louder.
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