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unConference Singapore 2009 saw a turn out of about 400 people, with a 85-15 male-female ratio
(what else, did you think it was the other way round? I had actually thought female representation
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would be slightly smaller). It had certainly grown in size from last year, more than doubling its
number of attendees.
With a mean attendee age of 30.7 years and median age of 29 years, unConference 2009 was a
pretty young and tech-savvy crowd. The event saw an attendee profile breakdown of 65% startups,
10% corporate, 5% investors, 20% others (govt, media, students).
We also saw some of our Malaysian friends from Malaysia Entrepreneurs, MDeC and MAVCAP
drive across the Causeway to attend the event (the latter two are funding sources).
Singapore-based startups with Malaysian founders or operations can also see if they are eligible
for the funds.
MORNING SESSIONS
The morning session was more of a traditional conference style with everyone huddled together in
a big auditorium listening to the speakers on stage. While some may not have wanted this
traditional style, others liked its more formal way of starting the day, giving it more structure and a
common base that everyone shared.
There were certain failure points throughout the morning, with many complaining about the
counter registration, slides not showing and a lack of wifi. Despite that, unConference continued
the morning strong, with the speakers making up for the lack in other areas.
Scott Rafer of Lookery (sold MyBlogLog to Yahoo!) started the day with a keynote presentation
on starting a business, Southeast Asia, market size and types of good businesses.
In the past, it was difficult to start a company unless you were in Silicon Valley. But the world
economy has now changed and Southeast Asia has the mass to pull the liquidity and finance all
into one place.
There are huge opportunities here but be sure to have a big market. For any market that a company
goes into, the average market penetration rate is about 2-5%.
Scott gave a few examples regarding market size and revenue per user. His previous company,
MyBlogLog had 25% market share (of presumably the worldwide blogosphere) but could not
make users pay. Whereas for Lookery, his current startup has a much smaller market share
(projected in slides as 5%) but if say they charge users $2, this would mean that Lookery has a
much bigger turnover than MyBlogLog.
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These were Scott’s slides, though he didn’t get to present them as the technical system failed:
Moderator for the session was Benjamin Joffe (Plus8Star), with panelists: Dr Gang Lu (OpenWeb
Asia), Dr Lai Kok Fung (BuzzCity), Wong Hoong An (HungryGoWhere) and Scott Rafer
(Lookery).
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In General…
One thing about being an entrepreneur is that one has to decide where to focus one’s energy on.
Violating copyright and privacy always work in getting users.
On China…
tencent the company has estimated 600-700m of revenue from virtual items out of its 1billion a
year.
Some US companies prefer to go to Japan first rather than China as Japan has paying customers.
On Raising Money…
Some people want to do their company on a shoestring budget, but that wastes time. if take
funding, can grow faster.
Now with cloud computing, a company can be successful first then raise money later. This is
because they don’t need to spend so much on servers at the beginning as compared to the past
where a company will need to pay for and buy enough servers to ensure that their site doesn’t
crash.
The panel discussion veered off-tangent and discussed more about business in general, instead of
“Innovation in Asia”. While we had hoped for more concrete points and examples about
innovation in Asia, this was only briefly touched upon by the panelists.
Before lunch, MDA also gave a presentation on the Interactive Digital Media programme office.
AFTERNOON SESSIONS
The afternoon part of unConference was more like an ‘unconference’, with breakout rooms and
more movement of audience in and out of rooms.
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The CEO of Fusion Garage, the local company who developed the software on CrunchPad, talked
about bringing the product global. Though some of key points mentioned were useful, we felt that
the session focused too much on a product (CrunchPad) going global, rather than a startup going
global.
Key takeaways:
Going for overseas conferences is important if you want to think about going global. This is where
you can showcase your product and get fans internationally.
If you deliver a kickass product, people will be willing to pay for it.
Asian Innovation: Building relevant local companies & having a shot at building a global
one! - Benjamin Joffe
Something that doesn’t really work in a market can be a big success in another market. For
example, Feiyue shoes (picture above). Made in China, they are considered unfashionable in
China and sell for $5. But in France, they are in the ‘in’ thing and are very fashionable. They sell
for 50 euros there.
In building a regional or global champion, a (regional or) global idea is needed. It is also
important to leverage resources globally. These days, it is almost irrelevant to talk about a
company being of a certain ‘citizenship’.
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eJamming
eJamming has a patented technology that solves the latency (lag) issue over the internet. Their live
demo with a singer here in Singapore and an assortment of drums and guitar over the internet
jamming live together was nothing short of amazing.
Of course, it would have been better if we could have watched the ‘band’ play live from their
various parts of the world.
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iTwinn
If you’re looking for another solution to access your hard drive remotely or simple transfer files
between two computers, check out iTwin. It consists of a pair of small USB devices that is
plugged into each computer and allows you to access the computer remotely. No software
downloaded is needed.
So what if you lose one of the devices? You can remotely shut the other down.
iTwin
Genkii
Ken Brandy of Genkii presented Sparkle, the first 3D virtual world on the iPhone/iPod. Watch one
of their first products, the Sparkle Instant Messenger here:
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Watch Ken Brady present Genkii at unConference and read an interview with him.
Frenzoo
Frenzoo is targeted at teenage females and so while it didn’t seem to excited the crowd as much,
their target audience weren’t sitting in the audience. There were also a few tweets on the ‘avatars
looking weird’. But say what you want, all that matters is for Frenzoo’s audience to love their
product.
Also read our interview with Thorben Linneberg of Orsiso, Jonathan Chua of Klout and Nguyen
Tran of mobizCOM.
For a few 30secs elevator pitches of some of the startups who had a booth and/or pitched (iAlif,
FolioHouse, Human Network Labs, MOBIZcom, CountSpin and Ffffoundtape), visit SocialPR.
Apart from SGEntrepreneurs, Bernard also spends his time at Thymos Capital (where I also am at)
and SENATUS, a private professional and social network ‘with offline relevancy’. He is a
foremost expert on social networks and gave a talk at unConference on his pet subject.
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This was more of an idiot’s starter guide to Plone and Django, alternatives to Wordpress and the
like if you’re thinking of CMSes. Kenny gave a good presentation outlining various aspects of the
systems and compared and contrasted them as well.
He also gave some examples of sites using Plone and Django. This part I found particularly
interesting because it shows the end results of what we can do with the respective systems! For
example, did you know that CIA, FBI, NASA and Akamai use Plone? And Washington Post and
Toronto Life use Django?
Some of us adjourned to Hannibal restaurant at Robertson Quay, only to have our orders messed
up (though we had a really long table of people) such that some of us had to break away to another
restaurant to eat (we were all starving!).
The conversations continued long after unConference Singapore 2009 ended. A fitting end to a
great day! It was a great event which saw many participants from around the region and
elsewhere. Kudos to the team at E27!
Additional Links
Related posts:
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Comments
It’s Reach, rather than Market Share, which is a big difference. And the
numbers on the ‘equation’ slides are to show scale, rather than being a specific
projection or historical number.
Without the slides to present in real time, I wasn’t as precise with my definitions as I’d
normally like.
2. The Startups That Rocked UnConference 2009 | Young Upstarts on Sun, 24th May
2009 10:21 pm
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