Founder of Guestlist.ph, Ron Baetiong

Like to feel like a VIP everytime you party? Want to be up-to-date about the latest clubbing events? Hate to get confused on which event to go? Guestlist.ph is here to help.

An online guest list to Manila’s best nightclubs, lounges and bars, Guestlist.ph makes sure that having difficulties in finding the right access to the right parties becomes the thing of the past.

e27 interviews founder of Guestlist.ph, Ron Baetiong, to find out more about how he is shaking up the night scene of Manila.

How did the idea of Guestlist.ph come about? And what difference has it made to the partying scene in the Phillipines?

Guestlist.ph was first conceived when I was writing a thesis while studying Entrepreneurship in the University of Santo Tomas in 2009. Our thesis involved actualization the business during our senior year and running it for a whole year.

Longing to start something creative of my own, I decided to combine my passion, clubbing, into my brainstorming sessions of how I could improve the whole system. I discovered that the main problem of clubbing is that if you didn’t know any club promoter, you’d have to pay the cover charge at the door. Plus, one may be limited to a certain promoter depending on which night it is.

Thus, I thought that it would be a great idea if everyone could just choose where they want to go without going through the hassle of looking for a promoter. With no marketing budget, it became a hit. Guestlist.ph revoluntionized the whole guest listing system and we were able to get 50,000 party enthusiasts to use our free online guest listing system.

Do you think Guestlist would be able to be exported to other countries too? How well received do you think it’ll be in other countries? (Since the partying scene is different in different countries)

Wherever you are in the world, being on the guest list is always considered a privilege gaurantees free entry. It is a way for clubs to drive traffic to their venue and thereby increasing their chances of having higher bar sales (their main revenue stream).

Rules may vary in other countries but there is a common denominator for all clubbing enthusiasts nontheless. Everyone wants to save money or at least maximize their money’s worth. With that being said, we are confident that we can transplate this to other parts of the world no matter which country we are in. It is just a matter of adjusting to the culture but the system is pretty much the same.

What problems have you encountered during the actualization of Guestlist?

The main constraint that we have encountered in this project is awareness. Clubbing is a habit-forming business. People are used to doing the same things over and over again, until they realize that there is a better way for them to do things easier.

So far, we are doing a good job reaching out to people and telling them the good news that we are here to make partying easier for them. However, there is still much work to be done in order to reach everyone and tell him or her the good news.

Were merchants open to this idea since Guestlist is essentially bringing all the competitors closer to one platform?

At first, clubs were skeptical about the idea but when they saw how much traffic I was able to give them. But they soon realized that Guestlist.ph allowed them to promote their venue and their events with much greater conveneince. We started to build a lasting symbiotic relationship with them.

What are your future plants for Guestlist? E.g. partnerships, feature developments, market expansion etc.

Guestlist.ph is just the first step of the 3-step process that we have laid out. We are in the process of partnering with big telecommunications sponsors and brands that would give our users more perks when they go out.

Also, we are developing the e-commerce functionality of the site and after a few months we will be launching the app. The next step for Guestlist.ph is to usher in 2 more projects that would give our users the choice to go out to more nightlife hotspots (not just clubs) and by January, we want to migrate our site to Singapore or Thailand under a name that would be globally known.

How is the traction like for Guestlist and what are some of the feedback you’ve gotten from partygoers so far?

We have grown rapidly ever since Guestlist.ph was launched 3 weeks ago and there have been increasing number of users who use the site and the Facebook app. We have been getting positive feedback about it and have been featured on several radio stations, magazines and other sites.

This is only the beginning. We expect to be full blown during our launch party by late June or early July.

Jay Fajardo (Founder & CEO of Proudcloud)

Jay Fajardo describes himself as a technopreneur, code jockey and startup junkie. A founder and CEO of Proudcloud, an agile Ruby on Rails development firm out of Manila, he is also founder of tech startup community Roofcamp and is the organizer of Startup Weekend Manila. Rise of Emerging Markets will be the topic Jay highlights during the panel discussion at Echelon 2012.

Jay is a passionate practitioner of agile methodologies, Web 2.0 best practices, social computing, and the lean startup mentality. In less than two years, Jay has built Proudcloud from the ground up to become one of the leading Ruby on Rails development firms in the Philippines.

Under Jay’s leadership, Proudcloud has attracted the country’s best developers that share the company’s vision of nurturing an environment of innovation, collaboration, and purposeful work.

Proudcloud strives to share this passion with our clients to create a mutual desire to build great things. He is determined to build a better web in a fearless and heroic way.

With almost 20 years of tech experience, Jay has been involved in many startup ventures with various internet and technology concerns including new media, applications development, and Voice-over-IP. The combination of his management capabilities and hands-on technology experience has given Fajardo a unique edge in founding and steering innovation driven companies from a Senior Executive level.

He was the founder and CEO of Airborne Access Corporation for 6 years from April 2002 to January 2008. He established the country’s first Wi-Fi hotspot operator which today is the largest and most popular Wi-Fi network in the Philippines with over 600 hotspots throughout the country. While leading and growing the company from a management perspective, Fajardo also played the lead role in developing the product and brand as well as the technology architecture.

As CEO, Fajardo’s role was to define the company’s vision, act as chief strategist, and bear P&L responsibilities. Fajardo has fully divested his equity in the company which is now 100% owned by PLDT/SMART Communications, the Philippines’ largest telecommunications fixed line and wireless carrier.

Jay Fajardo (Founder & CEO of Proudcloud)

Jay Fajardo (Founder & CEO of Proudcloud) is one of the awesome speakers at Echelon 2012. This tech conference is a two-day, double-track event on 11 and 12 June 2012 with over 1,100 delegates, a demo pit of up to 50 regional startups per day and various workshops. Get your tickets now!

Mathieu Le Bras (two from the right) and Yusep Rosmansyah (right) with agri-store owners in West Java (Credit: 8Village

Understanding the true needs of their consumers, 8Villages forgoes all kinds of new technical advancements to use simple 2G/GPRS because they want to ensure farmers in Indonesia are no longer disadvantaged.

In June 2011, Mathieu Le Bras, an agronomist with an INSEAD MBA degree, decided to address key issues faced by small holder farmers from developing countries. 8Villages was then started with a vision of providing farmers simple yet actionable information, while connecting mobile carriers and large agribusinesses to the farmers at the bottom of the pyramid.

Le Bras partnered with Dr Yusep Rosmansyah, an Indonesian telecommunications scientist, to introduce a mobile website that allowed the 40 million farmers in Indonesia to access crop-specific forums and richer crop intelligence using simple 2G/GPRS.

According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than a billion farmers reside in Southeast Asia, China and India alone. Out of these numbers, 8Villages estimates that 77 percent own mobile phones but 68 percent of them experience difficulties in accessing important, accurate and timely information.

8Villages help feed farmers with market intelligence information such as crop pricing, lookbook of the national planting and harvest season, and local seeds and harvest offers. These are done through “crop groups” that was launched last February. The startup has since transformed the format from pure SMS to SMS plus voice and content, which translates market intelligence information to better suit farmers’ needs.

Revenue models include revenue sharing with mobile carriers via revenue generated per user. Marketing intelligence and campaigns organized for agribusinesses that want to reach out to farmers and seed sellers or harvest buyers who also want to reach out to these communities.

With over a 1000 farmers in West Java, Indonesia actively participating in the “crop groups” community, 8Villages plans to expand the service by collaborating with a leading Indonesian telecommunication carrier and other key multinational agribusinesses in mid 2012.

They have also targeted Vietnam and Philippines to be part of their international expansion plans given the similarities in farming industries and telecommunication landscapes

“The concept behind our company is receiving strong support from authorities given the food security challenges faced by the nation and is having the back-up of the major agri-businesses companies there. Indonesia is all about network and we have been lucky to identify the rights partners in Jakarta to get into the particular tech-scene and ecosystems,” says Le Bras.

Photo: Google Images

It is hard to find an industry that is as highly centralized as the Venture Capital industry: centralized in the US, and specifically in one street in Silicon Valley: Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. However, this is gradually changing as the VC industry is developing fast in many sometimes unexpected places. You might call them ‘Valleys of the East’: Silicon Valley type areas that are emerging across Asia Pacific and present a huge opportunity for technology innovation and investments:

Fortitude Valley and the Silicon Beach initiative in Australia Bandung’s developers that feed the startups in Jakarta, Indonesia Silicon Gulf around Davao City, and the outskirts of Makati & Manila in the Philippines Bangalore Valley in India Zhongguancun in Haidan district, Beijing, often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.

The largest of these are obviously in India and China. Bangalore Valley is a vibrant hub of innovation and startups, which has grown out of the many companies that specialize in R&D, electronics, software, and BPO. During the dotcom boom, Bangalore’s IT industry saw the emergence of many local and global IT companies, which helped to lay the foundation for the tech eco-system of universities, R&D centers, developers, and component suppliers.

Photo: Google Images

Like Bangalore, Zhongguancun started out a hub for electronics and IT and was referred to as ‘electronics avenue’ in the 1980’s. The area was labeled “Beijing High-Technology Industry Development Experimental Zone” in 1988 by the Chinese government. Different than the more organic process that led to the emergence of Bangalore Valley, the support of the government has helped to build the eco-system that led to the boom in developers, innovation, and tech startups in this area.

The more mature Valleys of the East have also developed a booming VC industry, and it is interesting to see how these differ from each other and from the more established VC sector in the US:

In terms of the size of VC market, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) in the US stated that $22B was invested in the US in 2010, while $12.3B was raised by VC funds. For the same hear, Zero2IPO Research Center shows very different numbers for China: $5.4B was invested and $11.2B was raised. Hence, the amounts of money raised are quite similar but the value of actual investments in China is only about 25% of those in the US.

Another interesting difference is the risk profile of the various markets. This is closely related to the size of Early Stage investments, i.e. Seed Series A. The NVCA has calculated that the dollar value of early stage investments in the US is about 32%. In China, this is a mere 6% according to Zero2IPO.

You can see how these markets differ significantly across various key variables, but tend to align well to their local markets, which in turn vary by orientation, culture, and industry focus. Like the VC’s, the startups differ significantly across the various regions. More on that later.

About Pieter Kemps

Pieter works for Amazon Web Services and interacts closely with leading VC’s and fast growing tech startups in Asia. He is passionate about startups that combine product innovation with strong business model economics. Amazon Web Services is a Supporting Sponsor at Echelon 2012,

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the personal thoughts of Pieter Kemps and do not reflect the views of his employer or their associates.

Clint Nelsen (Co-founder & Director of Startup Weekend) Speaker at Echelon 2012

No stranger to the startup world, Clint Nelsen is the Co-founder and Director of Startup Weekend. He was listed in Forbes as a “Name You Need to Know In 2011″ and was featured on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine.

Passionate about startups and technology, Clint Nelsen is a regular entrepreneurship lecturer at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. On 11th and 12th June, he will be part of the panel that will be discussing Startup Growth and Scaling at Echelon 2012 in Singapore.

Startup Weekend was initially created as an event where a group of individuals would brainstorm a single business idea and work to bring that business to fruition over the course of the weekend.

Today, Startup Weekend has grown into an organization with a global presence, having organized at least 207 events spanning 120 cities and 35 countries. It has also has built a network of more than 25,000 alumni, 150 volunteer organizers and 60 trained facilitators spread across more than 175 cities in 500 countries.

In March last year, Startup Weekend became an affiliate of the Kauffman Foundation, the largest foundation for entrepreneurship in the world.

Clint Nelsen is also the co-author of Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company from Concept to Creation in 54 Hours, alongside Marc Nager and Franck Nouyrigat.

The book contains best practices, lessons learnt and empowering examples derived from Startup Weekend’s experiences for individuals and startups to follow as they launch new businesses. Each of the key beliefs have been tried, tested and proven to yield positive results and will give any business idea a greater chance for success.

Brian Wong, Founder and CEO of Kiip, and fellow speaker at Echelon 2012 commented about the book, “Startup Weekend is the most current account of how the modern tech entrepreneur will operate and succeed. Sure, the person, the hustle, the persistence, and the environment all account toward success—but to hit your key fundamentals, this book will be the best.”

Clint Nelsen has been featured in many publications around the world including the New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Entrepreneur Magazine, Glamour Magazine.

Clint Nelsen (Co-founder & Director of Startup Weekend) Speaker at Echelon 2012

Clint Nelsen recently founded Startup Labs. Startup Labs is a global seed stage investment fund aiming to disrupt the startup scene by reinventing the traditional incubation process and helping companies launch in various countries. It operates a three week program in cities around the world investing seed capital into 5 teams in each city.

Working with local investment partners and shares the local investment in the startups, Startup Labs will host 15 events in 15 countries for 2012 with the goal of 100+ cities happening soon. Startup Labs is open to all investors and all team may apply. The best way to think of the program is 500 startups meets Startup Weekend with teams building startups in countries around the globe.

When he is not busy with startups and events, Clint is a pilot, enjoys mountain biking, snowboarding, camping and photography.

He also loves traveling.

Clint Nelsen (Co-founder & Director of Startup Weekend) is one of the awesome speakers at Echelon 2012. This tech conference is a two-day, double-track event on 11 and 12 June 2012 with over 1,100 delegates, a demo pit of up to 50 regional startups per day and various workshops. Get your tickets now!

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

A fresh snapshot of Asia’s social media landscape reveals which service dominates in each country – and it’s especially good news for Facebook, which has added more than 20 million users across Asia in the past six months.

The infographic and its stats were put together by the Singapore-based branding and PR agency WeAreSocial. It points out that Facebook now has more than 192 million users across the 24 main Asian wired nations.

The only countries that prefer a different social network are China (where Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QZone dominates), Vietnam (Zing), South Korea (CyWorld), and Japan (Twitter). In the latter country, Japanese social network Mixi has been struggling and is now getting swamped by both Facebook and Twitter.

In China, Tencent’s Qzone looks monstrously huge, but its user numbers have dropped by five million since we last checked on the Asian social media scene last year. That squeeze will have been caused by increasingly popular microblogs (weibo), such as those from Sina and Tencent itself.

Here’s the current view across the region, with the newest site-reported stats that are available for each country (click to enlarge):

Check out which social networks are the most popular in each nation in Asia (May 2012) - Click to enlarge.

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

The Payroll Hero team pitching at Philippines Satellite

Payroll Hero took the Judges’ Choice at the recent Philippines Satellite.

Philippines Satellite saw seven companies pitch with Payroll Hero emerging as the winner of the Judges’ Choice Award. From the startup pitches, it is clear that the Philippines presents abundant opportunities for startups to capitalize on. With the rapid development of the country, much is being demanded in terms of infrastructure and this can be solved by the implementation of innovative technologies. Check out the pre-Philippines Satellite post for the full list of the seven pitching companies.

The community at Philippines Satellite

The pitching startups presented solutions ranging from employee and project management tools to getting you on the hottest nightlife actions in each city. With the obvious talent and understanding of the market’s needs, the community would definitely benefit with placement of stronger support and infrastructure. Currently, there seem to be a limited amount of mentorship and funding support for the community. One can only envision the leaps the community can take once the right ingredients are in place.

The e27 team had a great time in Manila catching up with the local community and finding our more about the startups there. View our photo album on the Philippines Satellite here.

Well, here’s a fun surprise. Remember Friendster? The social network that used to be the social network before it was eventually acquired by MOL who went on to flip its social patents for a tidy profit? Well MOL just announced today that Friendster has been overhauled as a social discovery and gaming platform.

MOL Groups CEO, Ganesh Kumar Bangah, elaborated on Friendster’s metamorphosis:

By leveraging on Friendster’s strongest asset in the form of its millions of users and harnessing MOL’s strength as a e-payments and content distributer, we were able to successfully redesign Friendster to become a social discovery and gaming platform, host to the largest online community in Southeast Asia.

Coming back to the site for the first time in years, I was surprised to see that you can login to Friendster with your Facebook credentials. In addition, when posting status updates you can also check a box to double-post to Facebook. You can also import friends from Facebook and common mail accounts. (The Facebook integration seems a little ironic to me, as they were the buyers of MOL’s afore mentioned social patents.)

As for the social gaming aspect, there is currently a range of over 50 games, including single-player, multi-player, and MMO titles; spanning across genres like adventure, arcade, strategy, role-playing, and card games. My esteemed colleague Charlie will be delighted to hear that they even have a Three Kingdom’s game! Users can chat while playing games, as well as earn rewards for certain activities, like adding friends or playing games.

Friendster's Featured Games

According to the announcement, Friendster will be hosting a big game event this Friday at the SM North Cyberzone Activity Area in Manila, The Philippines. Indeed, the Philippines appears to be a big focus for the network, as that has always been a stronghold among its membership. COO Nikolai Galicia commented:

[I]t is a joy to roll out Friendster’s inaugural event here, to a community that is continuously growing. We are committed in continually bringing the latest content and giving the most compelling rewards to our users.

It will be interesting to see how this rebirth goes for Friendster. Social gaming has been lucrative for other players, and with MOL’s expertise in payments processing, the service shouldn’t encounter too much friction in getting users to shell out for virtual goods and other in-game purchases.

Photo:JFDI

In this article, we take a quick look at the startups participating. The startups founders hail from a diverse range of countries including: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, India, New Zealand, Canada, France and the Netherlands.

Read on for a complete list of the startups

ShopSpot: mobile phone app that makes buying and selling items as easy as sending a tweet.

Qryo: A document sharing service for the masses that connects your printer to the cloud. Anything you can print, you can publish online!

Remember: the family Time Capsule in your pocket that makes it simple to capture and relive memories on your smartphone.

Tradegecko: a web-based supply chain portal for independent brands and their retailers.

FamilyKo: a tele-parenting app for Overseas Filipino Workers to bond with their young children.

Trafflers: By taking the pain out of planning and booking group holiday travel experiences, we give the travel industry access to a new segment of social leisure travellers.

Fetch Plus: a Facebook and Twitter page builder that helps large brands with local businesses control brand identity, monitoring and maximizing the impact of their social media marketing.

Kark Mobile Education: a hybrid game platform using trading cards and Android tablets to make 4–12 year old children masters of a simulated world.

Flocations: Our travel visualizer shows nearby destinations on an interactive map, so leisure travelers can browse by budget and book their next getaway in minutes, not hours.

Wildby: a fun talking encyclopedia on your iPhone that 4 to 8 year olds can enjoy without needing any literacy skills.

TribeHired: the social recruitment platform that puts friends to work.

Source: JFDI

Startup Weekend Manila 2012 is coming in a few days now, The last event was amazing: brimming energy, enthusiasm and inspiration. The one thing about startups that excites us most is their fresh thinking. And if there’s anything which comes close to that it is the experience of meeting fellow startup people.

Startup Weekend is about turning ideas into action. It’s about manifesting a vision into an all out product that can be used to solve problems. Designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and marketers are welcome to join in on the fun we call Startup Weekend, April 27th through the 29th at MINT College, McKinley Hill, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City.

Startup Weekend Manila 2012 will be sponsored and hosted by Globe, ProudCloud, MINT College, Kickstart and Dynamic Objx.

Startup Weekend Manila 2012

Judges Panel for 2012 StartupWeekend Manila: Eric Ramirez – Entrepreneur / Investor, Jojo Flores – Plug and Play Tech Center, Gwendolyn Regina Tan – SGEntrepreneur, Anne Cheng – Startup Nation/Rumplestiltskin, Martin Lichauco – Global Gateway Venture Capital, Minette Navarrete – Kickstart Ventures and Jennifer Ang-Alcabao – ICCP Venture Partners, Inc.

Here are several other amazing mentors: Guyi Shen – Founder at LobangClub, Luis Buenaventura – Founder at Infinite.ly, Art Ilano - Professor at UP for Strategy & Marketing and Samuel Pigott – COO / Founder at SourcePad

So you’re thinking about attending Startup Weekend Manila 2012, Here’s the full event schedule.

Startup Weekend Manila

Check out Startup Weekend Manila on Twitter and use the hashtag #swmanila.

Make sure you’re a part of the action this year Startup Weekend Manila.

This post was written by John Arce, founder at WebGeek Philippines