Seed Forum International Foundation will be hosting a by-invitation only Seed Forum Singapore event on 7 June 2012.

As with most conferences, Seed Forum will be packed with company presentations, company pitches, keynotes and a networking lunch.

Attendees of the event include individual investors, investment companies and other key finance intermediaries who will gain first-hand insight into a select group of innovative born global companies looking to expand their internationally. They can expect to meet executives of aspiring born global companies from Scandinavia who will be presenting their investment case at the forum. Each of the presenting companies have been pre-selected by the Seed Forum selection panel.

About Seed Forum

Seed Forum is a global organization hosting investor conferences in more than 30 countries and is considered as one of the most professional and experienced venues for presentations of investor ready start-up companies.

You can find more information on Seed Forum at www.seedforum.org

Vincent Lauria (Co-founder of Lefora and Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures)

Vincent Lauria spent more than half a decade  in Silicon Valley building two different startups, Meetro.com, a location-based chat service which was dissolved with many lessons learned in 2007; and Lefora.com, a hosted forum service which grew to over 100,000+ communities and was acquired in 2010.

Spending 2011 traveling around Asia, meeting with startups, investors, and budding entrepreneurs, Vincent Lauria  is part of a panel discussion, “State of the Investment Ecosystem in Southeast Asia” at Echelon 2012.

More lovingly known as Vinnie, he is passionate about the startup and entrepreneurial lifestyle and truly enjoys bringing the Silicon Valley spirit to other places. He is also sometimes known as “Paul Bragiel‘s other half.”

From your journey as a startup founder to an investor, what is the biggest takeaway for you?

‘People’ are what make great startups, not ideas.

What attracted you to settle in Singapore and look for investment opportunities in the region?

The community.  Singapore has a really strong community of entrepreneurs and developers helping each other out.  I had the fortune of first seeing this at HackerSpace, then a few months later at SuperHappyDevHouse.

Vincent Lauria (Co-founder of Lefora and Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures)

How do you view the ideas coming out from Southeast Asia and where do you think their potential lies?

Quite honestly, not as refined as the valley on how to get to market.  However, I see great potential across the region.   A lot of entrepreneurs here are doing this for the first time, there isn’t the same platform of the valley, with an ecosystem of serial internet entrepreneurs and angel investors to help with mentoring and connections.  I can feel some exciting changes coming over the horizon.

We have seen many products making the West to East move, but few in the other direction. Should startups here concentrate on the markets close to home or attempt to expand into the western markets? How can they do it better?

My bet is that startups should concentrate here on the markets close to home as the ‘low hanging fruit’.  As the ecosystem matures, it will open up opportunities for competing in western markets.

Vincent Lauria (Co-founder of Lefora and Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures)

Vincent Lauria (Co-founder of Lefora and Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures) 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!

Unwired 2012 Photo: Unwired

With the mobile industry exploding and more opportunities unveiling itself in this industry, companies are no longer undermining the mobile phone.

Singapore’s independent wireless and mobile conference, UNWIRED 2012 conference, have thus emerged to explore the various opportunities and challenges in the mobile industry.

Some of the key issues which will be addressed in the conference includes smarter networks for a smoother mobile experience, machine-to-machine communications in future, the future of mobile cloud services for consumers and corporates, a unified interface for phones, tablets and PCs to access cloud services, and more. Third of its kind in Singapore, UNWIRED 2012 will not only see representatives from Google, IDA, StarHub, Samsung, Microsoft and more on stage for its keynotes, but also demos of the first Windows 8 devices this year.

Details:

What: UNWIRED 2012 conference
When: May 31, 2012, 1pm
Where: Angsana 3F, Level 3, Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre, 10 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore 018956
Website: www.unwired.com.sg

There will also be after-event drinks at MBS for a great networking session.

Each conference pass costs S$80. Members would be entitled to a 25% discount upon entry of the discount code – MBS50.

Three complimentary passes would be given to readers of e27.  To stand a chance to win at the passes, simply leave a comment telling us why you want to be at the conference.

Jon Yongfook (Founder of Tinytrunk)

Yongfook is a serial web entrepreneur. He was previously a Director of Glamour Sales, a high-end commerce  flash site with operations in Japan and China, which was funded up to Series-C. He was a consultant for Dentsu, Avenue A and Razorfish, and sold his first Internet company, Nibbledish, a food recipe social network. His last position held was Director of International Product at Cookpad, Japan’s largest recipe site. Jon has more than a decade of  of experience in development and marketing for consumer internet, e-commerce and mobile, with professional experiences in London, Tokyo and Singapore.

Yongfook is currently working on his new startup, Tinytrunk, an online shopping neighborhood of Southeast Asia’s best independent retailers, fashion labels and merchants.

With a flamboyant personality and a hint of fashionista in him, Jon is not your typical startup guy. He is part of a panel discussion, “Process for Success: A Discussion with 5 Regional Startup Incubators” at Echelon 2012 this June.

Tell us more about TinyTrunk and how you got started on the product.

Tinytrunk started in February 2012 as a simple peer-to-peer marketplace where you could sign up, post an item to sell and easily accept payment via PayPal. I built it because I just wanted a simple way to “hook up a photo with a paypal button”.

Quickly though, I received demand from other types of sellers such as retailers and fashion labels who wanted to use the platform but in a more organized manner and had ideas for features they wanted.

The direction I’m steering Tinytrunk in now is a shopping destination for the best of Southeast Asia’s independent retailers, designers and merchants – a place for them to easily set up a shop and be surrounded by their peers. Kind of the “Anti-Gmarket”, which focuses on generic, low-price goods and I find hard to navigate and generally unpleasant to use.

Jon Yongfook (Founder of Tinytrunk)

You were previously with Glamour Sales in Japan, what was your main role there and key takeaways that is helping you with TinyTrunk now?

Glamour Sales is the No.2 online destination in Japan for luxury retail (I lived in Japan for 10 years before deciding to move to Singapore). I joined as Web Director back in 2009 very early on in the company’s life and assumed responsibility for basically all the online activities, both development and marketing related.

We went from 0 users to around half a million by the time I had left and were doing $XX million in revenue annually. The company is still going strong and I’m still an advisor. My key takeaways from my two years there were that e-commerce is not really about fancy technology stuff at all. It’s about customer acquisition, marketing to those customers, and fulfilling your promise to those customers. Ideally, I want to make those three things easier for all my tenants on Tinytrunk.

What is your opinion on the tech startup environment in Singapore and how can it be better?

I’ve only been here a year, but one thing I’ll say is that I’m very impressed with how many people I met who *want* to do a startup. I think that’s a good start for any growing startup scene. It’s very different to living in Japan where you rarely meet young people who have ideas that they want to build into a company.

I would like to see more startups thinking regionally though. The Southeast Asian market is around 600 million. It’s fragmented as hell but it’s closer to home and it’s underserved by Silicon Valley startups. Any local startup that can crack Southeast Asia or parts of it will reap significant rewards. I still think there’s tons of opportunities to be explored in B2B2C in Southeast Asia, Groupon and Airbnb-style businesses were just the beginning.

Jon Yongfook (Founder of Tinytrunk)

As both a programmer and a designer, what do you think are some of the key elements that make or break a startup?

I’m a hybrid marketing hacker and product hacker (Ruby on Rails). One thing I’ll say – don’t forget about sales. You need good inbound marketing sure. You need great design and beautifully-written, maintainable code, sure. But don’t forget that you also need someone whose sole job it is to go round town knocking on doors, getting people to sign on the dotted line.

I’ve worked with people who are very good at that and I feel they are a key player in moving the businesses beyond the early product development phase.

Jon Yongfook (Founder of  TinyTrunks) 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!

Dropmyemail, claimed to be one of the fastest growing website, hires Google Southeast Asia’s senior conversion specialist, Vinoaj Vijeyakummar as the Head of Product Development to possibly tackle user acquisition.

Taking a deeper look at Dropmyemail’s CEO John Fearon’s background, John has a strong background in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and online marketing, this strongly built up its initial huge growth: their service, which allows users to backup their online emails to the cloud has announced user numbers of 525,000, in only 50 days after starting operations. As John’s LinkedIn description puts it, things were definitely blowing up at Dropmyemail.

However, Alexa chart shows that recently, Dropmyemail has not been enjoying the traffic ranks that it used to enjoy, and it has the highest bounce rate since its launch.

While things might look gloomy from the Alexa chart, the move to bring in Google Southeast Asia’s senior conversion specialist, Vinoaj Vijeyakummar as the Head of Product Development, is definitely a strategic move to possibly drive more conversions for Dropmyemail.

Vinoaj’s specialties lies in leveraging tools such as Google Analytics and Google’s Website Optimizer to enhance online presence, thereby increasing web site traffic flow and revenue. Couple John’s strong SEO and online marketing background with Vinoaj’s expertise, we might see a different Alexa chart in just a matter of weeks.

Mathematical models were the hot discussion at this Friday Hacks.

This post is a first hand account from NUS Hackers on their weekly Friday Hacks, an IDA supported event to promote student developers throughout the tech startup community.

On the 16th of March, Dr. Shaun Martin, from Applied Cognitive Research (ACR) gave a talk titled “The Mathematics of Luxury”. Traditional economics makes many assumptions, one of which assumes that consumers behave rationally when purchasing items. However, much of the data collected about goods, and luxury goods in particular do not agree with this. ACR proposes that a model that takes into account the cognitive and social aspects of the behavior of consumers would be better suited for companies to better understand their market.

Dr. Martin spoke about the work being done at ACR, and gave everyone a taste of the type of mathematical models they were coming up with, and how they correctly model aspects of goods and how consumers purchase them.

He then stayed till about 10 pm, sharing more about his work and why he moved to Singapore to conduct his research.

Dr. Shaun Martin is a mathematician who recieved his PhD from Cambridge and then went on to prove theorems in quantum physics at MIT.

The next talk was from Varun Sivamani, who shared the joys of using GNU Screen, and how he used the tool in his daily work at Semantics3.

Screen is a Unix tool that allows users to maintain secure shell sessions to a machine even after they are disconnected. This makes it extremely useful for performing tasks that take time, or if you are connecting from a location where the connection is intermittent.

Varun shared several tips and tricks, including how to do collaborative programming using screen. 26 people attended this session of Friday Hacks.

NUS Hackers is a student-run organisation in the NUS dedicated in the spreading of the hacker culture and free/open-source software. To find out more who they are, what they do, head to their web page at http://nushackers.org.

Photo: Google Images

The VC landscape varies significantly across the different ‘Valleys of the East”, the Silicon Valley type areas that have started to develop across Asia.  Shaped by their respective economy, culture, business climate, market dynamics and opportunities, the startups also tend to have a different focus. Let’s explore how some of these are tapping into opportunities presented by their local market dynamics.

India – IT, BPO, and the skill gap

India is an emerging economy with specific dynamics and challenges that are caused by the mere size of the country and its population. The fast growth of the IT and Outsourcing industry has driven the requirement for “Learned” manpower. There is a massive gap between high-skilled jobs and low-skilled labor, and some people believe that this could adversely impact India’s economic growth.

Enter Classle, a startup that provides an online social learning platform. Build on the Amazon Web Services cloud, Classle offers online Academics, Projects, Quizzes, and more, all backed by an analytics engine that creates personal profiles and scorecards. This enables students to experience a social and fun way to learn and make their talent visible to employers. For employers in the IT and Outsourcing industry, it offers them a way to identify and hire talent faster and easier, with less risk as they have access to in-depth profiles & analytics on the candidates. Classle is a great example of a company that is born out of the needs of the local market, but could grow to address similar challenges in other emerging economies.

Singapore – high-end manufacturing

Singapore has developed incredibly fast in the last 40 years and now combines a high GDP with steady growth. Its economy leverages their location and port to be a main trading and financial hub. The country has also developed its high-end manufacturing industry, which helped it to become a prime location in the chip industry. When designing chips, a large part of the time and costs are actually spend on hardware and software to run simulations.

Plunify recognized this problem and built a smart platform for ‘Cloud-accelerated Chip Design’. On top of Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure, they built algorithms and an integration layer around different software tools for various stages of the chip design process. Altogether, this delivers a platform that drastically reduces the cost of the chip design process, while significantly accelerating the time to market. As such, they are potentially playing a key role in the growth and modernization of the chip industry in Singapore.

China – powerhouse of game developers

China is not just growing fast as an economic power-house; it also grows fast as a tech-savvy, connected society, with a very large and active community of engineers and developers. Many of these are based in the Zhongguancun area in Beijing (see my previous post) and focus on developing social games.

A great example of a successful social game developer in China is FunPlus Game, a leading social gaming company that currently ranks as one of the Top 7 game developers on Facebook with over 3 million daily active users (DAU).  In Europe, they are the top game developer on the leading social networks and the Netherlands and Germany and their farming game is the number one game in the Arabic version of Facebook. FunPlus games runs on AWS. “With our social game growing from 1 million to 3 million in 3 months, we can spin out more than 300 servers quickly, only managed by 1 engineer”, says Yitao Guan, CTO of FunPlus Game. His company continues to develop great games, leading to fast growth across the world.

All three companies are examples of innovation, entrepreneurship, and an ability to spot opportunities presented by local market dynamics. And these are just 3 of many…

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.

Slightly more than a month ago, we covered the launch of Spuul, a Bollywood movie streaming site. Smitty, the Chief Product Officer of Spuul, reached out to us and shared some of the extra features which they shipped today.

Web:

For the Spuul web app, there is an added feature, the Star Pages. In the Star pages, a list of all the Bollywood stars could be found and you can then discover and learn more about them. According to Smitty, the Indian movie scenes is all about the stars. The Star pages are meant for people to learn more about the actor and actresses and the movies that they are in. Spuul also have plans to do more communal things in the future and focus more on the people in the movies as well as the users. Other than that, Spuul has started to release english subtitles for some of its web content.

Mobile:

With mobile and smartphone penetration worldwide growing, companies which have not gone mobile yet might be losing out. Spuul is happy to announce that their Spuul iOS app for iPhone and iPad are out, and is available for download from the app store. With its mobile app, users can now stream their favourite Bollywood movies from Spuul and watch them on the go.

Bollywood’s market has an impressive growth rate of about 15% every year and Spuul is definitely on track to capture a piece of that huge Bollywood industry pie.

The Squiryl Logo Photo: Squiryl

Unlike most mobile loyalty systems, Squiryl has creatively differentiated itself by combining both loyalty systems, and social elements into one app. Not forgetting, the app’s vibrant and fun graphics.

One of the metrics for businesses to measure is customer retention and loyalty, and without doubt, this is a lucrative business. Squiryl, a social loyalty platform, is one such player in Singapore and e27 caught up with Mulyadi Syariffudin, cofounder of Squiryl to find out what they are doing.

Mobile Loyalty is a very competitive space. Where does Squiryl stand right now?

To answer this question, first of all, Squiryl is not a Mobile Loyalty. Well, we kinda are, but that’s not our end goal. As with our competitors, their whole purpose is to replace the currently loyalty card system with a digital one that sits in your phone and that’s the end of the story. They are usually just a service provider doing this for the merchants at a cost. So for our competitors, the issues related to the current loyalty programs, such as inefficiencies, wastage, etc. still exists. So like the example I brought up during the Indonesia Satellite, say now I go to a ramen place and earn some stamps on a card from that ramen place, but however, I decided I am not coming back to that ramen place, immediately this points out the inefficiencies of the current system. Which is why if you look at the loyalty programs out there now, you will see that there would be a lot of inactive users in their list. This is because these people are stuck with the stamps or points.

With Squiryl, the vision is to create one single community of users that all the merchants can tap on. These users can then not only interact with the merchants, but with fellow users as well. For example, one of the key interactions would be the trading function where users can trade Acorns of one particular merchant with another user for Acorns from another merchant. So as the trade happens, the merchants are simply, given a platform to exchange their inactive users for active users.

This video would further explain how the community of users is being established.

What is Squiryl’s traction like?

When we first started Squiryl, we were thinking our first target users would be young adults and students between 16 to 28. However, we slowly see an interest in merchants that are more mid to upper range and as a result we have also seen a shift in the user profile. Our current user base would be 60% female 40% male within the 18 to 35 age group. Our downloads is just slightly above 15,000 and we have about 5,000+ active users.

How can startups or SMEs leverage on mobile loyalty program to create more value to their customers and users?

The answer to this is also exactly why we created Squiryl as a social platform. Being social means we are totally free. No hidden cost, no freemium, nothing. Like how Jack Dorsey founded Square with the vision that no matter how small a business is, they should be able to accept credit card payment, for Squiryl, we believe that any business should be able to reward their customers for being loyal.

The Squiryl Team Photo: Squiryl

Could you tell us more about your expansion plan, especially in Indonesia.

We have started our office in Indonesia. We are currently in the final stages of development for BlackBerry and Android. We have started talks with the merchants. Our goal is to officially launch Squiryl in June. Our target is to get 500 outlets and 150,000 users in Indonesia by November.

Any exciting news and features which Squiryl is working on right now?

We are in the midst of creating the second phase of Squiryl which will strengthen the social part even more with features like social gaming, interactions, etc. However, at this time, we are still unable to share too much details.

What is Squiryl looking for at Echelon?

Our top priority would be to look for investors, followed by media coverage to get more exposure and publicity. We would also be happy to talk to merchants and explore possible collaborations.

Squiryl will be exhibiting at Echelon 2012 Startup Marketplace. The team pitched their product at the Indonesia Satellite in April.

So my friend Derrick Ko pointed me to this post telling of a student who interned at a US-based startup. The student was offered to extend his job role at a pretty hot company (no names mentioned though) for one more year. He wanted in, but the National University of Singapore (NUS) rejected the student’s application as he needed to delay his studies for a year.

From an entrepreneur’s point of view, it kind of sucks because the student isn’t able to do what he wants, which is gain more experience working, building, and learning with the startup. I thought Derrick put it very aptly, noting that there’s always time to finish a degree, but the opportunity to work at one of the hottest startups on the planet is very rare.

But from the University’s point of view, they have numbers they have to meet don’t they? But it’s more than just churning out graduates each year. It’s about revenue too I believe. If more students drop out halfway, revenue for the school would drop too. I graduated from the Singapore Management University (SMU) and have much praise for it. But it could have been better. The four-year business course could have been scaled down to three or even two years. Most of the first year courses I attended were an utter waste of time. And I strongly believe the only reason why all undergraduate programs at SMU were made four-years is because that would bring the school more revenue.

So yes, as a “corporation” the school did the right thing to reduce the dropout rate and thus increase revenue. And they have to do it very professionally, like they are doing it in the interests of the student. But it’s not cool for a student who knows what he wants to do. Why would the school have the final say to the student’s future?

I never believed in just scoring high-grades in school. I did okay, but not fantastic. I always believe in doing and executing things, learning from practical experience. Which is why I chose to say goodbye to good grades and started my first actual business at age 19. The real world is a good school because if you give it your all, it will reward you handsomely — whether you succeed or fail. I learned much more through doing than learning in University. In all fairness, University is a good stepping stone, but different individuals require different learning paths to reach their potential. So the thought of having everyone going through the gruesome four-year course is a pain for some people, especially for folks who have the entrepreneurial mindset.

At the end of the day, you know yourself best. Don’t get succumb to peer pressure or the system. Having graduated for about year now, I can safely say that grades seriously didn’t matter that much. If you’re good at executing and delivering actual results, people will queue up to hire you. So flip your middle finger to paper qualifications and choose a path best for you — not the best path for friends, family, or even your school.

[Photo credit]