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Prof Tom Kosnik started the seminar with a brief description of Silicon Valley (SV) as one area with one of the highest concentration of high-tech start ups. He further added that Singapore, Beijing and Bangalore also set up high-tech zones for entrepreneurship. To show his commendation for Singapore and NUS’s effort towards entrepreneurship, he reiterated “NOC and ilead are the coolest entrepreneurship programs.”

He went on to describe Stanford University as ground zero for entrepreneurship, particularly in high-tech ventures. In short, in Stanford University, professors get hands-on with new technologies research and students help to innovate. This astonishing combination of enthusiastic students and dedicated professors actually attracts an influx of entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley.

It is followed with the topic of the day – change of circles of influence. He briefly introduced that there are 3 circles of influence: players, stakes and code. Players include government, venture capitalists (VC), angel investors, research universities, public accounting firms, and investment banking (IB) firms, among others. Stakes are the time, money, customer relationship and technology from the players. Codes are the local implicit rules to raise funds or even to gather aid. They are different across industries in the same location and rooted in local entrepreneurial culture.

In the past decade, the leading players were IB and Nasdaq stock market while the smaller players were governmental agencies. Since the financial crisis in 2008, IB has invested less in VC funds. As raised by Prof Tom, there are 4 main reasons for less VC investment in SV: poor returns for VC funds in 20^th century compared with 1990s; returns from all other investments in their portfolios were less than expected so although a fixed percent of their portfolios was used for VC funds, total VC funds became smaller; fewer trusted IB to help with Initial Public Offering (IPO) and Mergence and Acquisition (M&A); public distrust requires VC to hold start-ups longer to reach profitability before exit.

Since VC funds become smaller, government, accelerators and incubators take over as the bigger players. For stance, government is eagerly encouraging and funding clean tech solutions. Interestingly, more entrepreneurs are using blogs and social media for quick start-ups and less dependence on funds.

He ended off the seminar charmingly with the ways entrepreneurs are coping with changes. These methods are beneficial and can act as references for local entrepreneur to handle changes or to raise funds. In general, more entrepreneurs are relying on parents for funding. Others are entering multiple competitions with same business ideas. Increasingly, entrepreneurs are sharing information of VCs on The Funded.com to inform others of good VCs – one that will provide more and demand less. In Prof Tom’s words, new generation of entrepreneurs are “avoiding the ‘old school VCs’ and working with ‘young guns’”. Fascinatingly, entrepreneurs of the past mainly focused on developing products whereas entrepreneurs of the new generation are focusing on developing products and customers at the same time. To cope with this new demand of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs spend more time listening to and working with customers.

In one night, the founders of two premier websites in Singapore will be sharing their entrepreneurial journey in building their own companies. They will also be discussing about the important aspects in creating a good website business and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and web developers.

Register now by clicking here

About :

HungryGoWhere.com is Singapore’s most popular and fastest growing food website, with more than 260,000 unique visitors reading HungryGoWhere.com every month and generating more than 2.4 million monthly page views and more than 16,000 reviews from then public, containing a comprehensive search of more than 5,000 F&B outlets. Launched in March 2007, HungryGoWhere.com is now the No.1 food website in Singapore, rated by HitWise for being the top website in the “Food and Beverage – Restaurants and Catering” category. It has expanded overseas to Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and Melbourne.

Gothere.sg utilizes a map-based interface for obtaining public transport directions and other information based on our own GIS data and proprietary routing algorithms. Through the site, a user can obtain directions, estimated time and cost to go from one location to another in Singapore based on the most efficient mode of public transport – bus, MRT or taxi. It also allows users to search for nearby amenities within a location including restaurants, banks etc.. The site currently serves several thousand unique visitors each day and is growing rapidly since it’s inception in May 2008.

Getting there (click on map to get Gothere.sg’s recommendation for your route)

Address: Level 2 Auditorium, University Hall, Lee Kong Chian Wing, 21 Lower Kent Ridge Road, Singapore 119077

Please contact incub3ppl@gmail.com for any clarification.

Much as I’d hate to admit it, the incessant buzz of the people around me, looking for their first job, has started to get to me.

The most popular job sites in Singapore are Jobstreet and JobsDB. I attended a JobsDB fair over the weekend and I was left feeling very unimpressed. It wasn’t any deficiency with organization or execution. The fair was managed exceptionally well. It was that exhibitors seemed to be from broadly 4 categories, namely insurance agencies, real estate agencies, educational institutions and government institutions, none of which interested me.

I came across Plaxo jobs while cleaning up my bookmarks today. It was well described in this Wired blog article. Imagine if you could leverage on your entire facebook contact list to search for a job, that in essence is the promise of Plaxo. It’s a really neat idea. I think it would help a lot for people to know a little about the social circle of the people they are hiring, or know where a job opportunity is coming from within their social circle. The social nature of the job search could also improve your chances of finding employment as your friends can be expected to help in whatever small way they can to refer you to the right job.

Another interesting site I’ve unearthed is philes. Again, tip to Wired. Wired’s article puts it succinctly. Jobaphiles is an “ebay for jobs” where potential employees can bid (lower) for a job compared to their peers. I think the idea will have limited traction in industries where salary levels aren’t very flexible. For example, most banks will pay standard remuneration packages that aren’t affected much by a candidate’s desired pay. However, in areas where contract work is concerned, this idea is a clear winner. The question of how successful it will be then becomes a question of how many short-term contract jobs are there in a recessionary environment.

Anyway these are interesting questions to ponder, but I’ve got to start submitting my own resumes now, so please excuse me.

Social entrepreneurs don’t get enough respect. There’s nothing wrong with running a non-profit halfway house for recovering drug addicts or providing vocational training to ex-convicts to assimilate them back into society. Its just that, among other things, these ventures are neither profitable nor exciting.

Of course, there’s no reason that this should remain true. The Economist has an article in one of its January issues describing a new, promising, fun, AND profitable business model for social entrepreneurship. Too good to be true? Read and find out.

I’m sure Virgance’s website has caught the eye of many an unemployed graduate. Now that I’ve got your attention, Virgance‘s website proudly proclaims its model as “Activism 2.0″. There are some truly amazing ideas coming from the brains of the entrepreneurial activists/activist entrepreneurs at Virgance. Aside from the the groundbreaking 1BOG and Carrotmob ideas already covered in the Economist article, Virgance is also working on a program called Lend Me Some Sugar that will allow muti-national firms to let their customers become involved in their corporate philantropy. Through Lend Me Some Sugar, customers can direct the philantropy efforts of the companies they support, letting customers and companies partner each other in doing good for society.

Virgance is only the tip of the new activism. “IfWeRanTheWorld” takes crowdsourcing (the idea of utilizing the power of crowds to achieve goals) and plunks it down in the middle of many intractable social problems we have today. It is still in the early planning stages (there isn’t even a website yet), but the idea is a remarkable one. Led by marketing veteran Cindy Gallop and software developer and serial entrepreneur Wendell Davi, IfWeRanTheWorld seeks to break down large social projects into small discrete parts that can be picked up by users to complete, and hence a great number of people can contribute to a massive project’s success, which could not have been achieved without massive effort otherwise. Both these ideas could become huge, in large part because they are profit-driven companies. The difference is that they don’t derive profits from the money going towards the project directly. Both expect a large part of revenues to come from advertising. Digital guru Esther Dyson has said that IfWeRanTheWorld could create a “liquidity of goodness”. I certainly can’t argue against that.

Twitter may be shiny and new, but its finances are reminiscent of the dark age of the dot-com bust. With no revenue or business plan, Twitter is still subsisting on investor capital. Before you think that Twitter is going the way of the web-based dodo, note that VC firms Benchmark Capital and IVP recently pumped $35 million into Twitter and Facebook bid $500 million of its stock for Twitter, reflecting rock solid investor confidence.

So confident is Twitter of its future that it organized its inaugural Shorty Awards in New York recently, honouring remarkable twitterers in categories as varied as food and videogames. People are finding remarkable uses for Twitter beyond its already amazing social value, including controlling home appliances and monitoring your home’s security. There is an excellent chance that some of these uses will ultimately become profitable. Even without these alternative uses, Twitter is already generating ad revenue in Japan, and getting fans from the American Congress and Israeli Consulate. Will we see Twitter bidding for government contracts to disseminate information in the future? Don’t bet against it.

Digital media is a funny business. No really I mean it. Let me tell you just what the grand old doyens of British comedy have done to their material. For the uninitiated, Monty Python is the name of a group of 6 comedians widely acknowledged as the funniest group of comedians ever.

No amount of writing can do justice to their comedic brilliance so I won’t try. However, the interesting story behind their Youtube adventure is this. So brilliant were the Pythons’ comedy that die-hard fans were posting much of their best performances on Youtube for all the world to see. As the music industry has already learned, suing filesharers alienates your customer and hardly makes a dent in the overall number of so-called pirates out on the www. You simply can’t sue enough quickly enough to make a difference.

The solution to this problem is of course to do the Python-esque thing.

Of course, this does seem like a trend. Radiohead pioneered online digital distribution with their album “In Rainbows”. Rock band Nine Inch Nails also tried their hand at it with their new album “Ghosts”. Radiohead made more off online distribution than they did with traditional media for their previous album “Hail to the Thief” even though users could download “In Rainbows” for free. This success is duplicated, no, exceeded, by Monty Python. They increased their DVD sales on Amazon by 23,000 percent after they unveiled their Monty Python channel.

Despite the seemingly outrageous success of online distribution, enthusiasm for this form of distribution doesn’t seem to be taking hold. Trent Reznor, lead singer for Nine Inch Nails, even claims that Radiohead was ‘insincere‘ about web distribution taking over as the new form of media distribution. What is stopping digital distribution from turning the tables on traditional brick and mortar distributors? Whoever knows the answer to that could well be the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry&Sergei et al.

My previous article seemed a tad depressing, considering that its a new year upon us. As such, I’ll tell a happier story today and also share a link to some really good deals.
Lets begin with the story first.

Winzip is a great program. If there were a list of programs that recognized the most important software in the history of the internet, Winzip would be on it, along with such luminaries as Netscape (Navigator), Mirabilis (ICQ) and mIRC. However, as with all things on the internet, users prefer not to pay for a full-featured version if they can avoid it.

Alex Rampell hit upon an idea to make Winzip more profitable. His company, Trialpay, gives Winzip users more incentive to pay for the full version. He does this by linking potential buyers to other good deals on the internet. A potential buyer for Winzip might not be willing to fork out $29.95 for Winzip alone, but together with a sweet discount deal for books on Amazon.com, the user just might be willing to buy both products. Amazon then pays Winzip (and Trialpay) a small fee for directing customers to them, and everyone is happy.

The logic contained therein is a fairly simple one. However, I believe that it just hasn’t been done online before. In retail stores, the tactic is common. Rather than offer straight discounts on items, some retailers offer for example a 30% discount on purchases of single items but 50% if you buy 3 items or more. The difference is retail stores can have many items that a buyer wants whereas online, Winzip stands alone.

I categorize the brilliance of this idea as “So good I wish I thought of it first!” Now you may commence shopping.

Over here in Singapore job seekers routinely sign up with jobstreet or jobsDB. They are a good resource for low to mid level jobs but for executive jobs, companies still turn to headhunters. What is it about executive level positions that preclude them from being listed on a website? Is it too ‘mass-market’? Is it that executives often are from a generation that use the internet as a workplace tool but not a lifestyle tool? Is it a pride issue that prevents executives from going to a jobs site online?

I don’t understand now because I think it is something just waiting to happen. Case in point: $100k+ Job search @ TheLadders. I can barely believe that this startup took so long to get started. Its one of those ideas that trigger a “Oh, why didn’t I think of that!” kind of response. I guess anyday now we’ll be seeing an Asian clone of this, and if we don’t, act fast to get there!

(source: http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/11/people-powered-internet.html)