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| Thursday, 12 March 2009 00:00 | |
Three start-ups see online opportunities On Tuesday, Illka Gobius attended a networking event that had an evening of presentations by recent technology start-ups. I thought that, in preparation for the “WIT Start-Up Pitch” competition, I would get to know some companies that are doing new things and find out what is being generated from Singapore. I came away inspired and warm in the knowledge that development is occurring. In particular, there were three ventures that inspired me. Twinty.com launched 3 months ago. It was built in part by Jeremy Synder who is the Managing Director of Metaversum Pte Ltd. Twinty’s main competitor is Second Life. Whereas Second Life is user generated, the real estate in Twinty is based on real life. You can travel to Berlin for example, and peruse the tourist attractions in three dimensions. Say you take a visit to the Berlin Wall, or peruse the shops on the main streets of London, what Twinty is doing is offering a cyber tourism experience. Snyder says that they are not challenged by copyright issues because the storefronts and displays are in public space as it were, but they are seeking to collaborate with the store owners none the less so that they buy their own real estate online. Like Second Life, you buy credits to trade online and buy or construct your own real estate on Twinty. I’m assured that while the learning curve is still necessary, the user experience aims to be easier than that of Second Life. Makeaffinity.com’s fumbling presentation attempts took me back to the lecture at ITB Asia last year with Dr Adrian Cheok. The owner, Thomas Tan, a recently returned Singaporean who lived in the UK for 10 years, has designed a site that lets you remote control a live robot. In the demonstration, he controlled a robot in a warehouse in Sengkang from Geek Terminal at Raffles Place. The potential of this technology is phenomenal. Imagine a skilled surgeon in New York operating on a person in remote Africa using a robot controlled via the internet. Makeaffinity.com is running a “Robot Idol” competition to entice robot enthusiasts to use their site. Anyone can participate and the winner will be voted by visitors to the site. What excited me most however was a three-week-old start-up by three National University of Singapore students, Wong Hong Ting, Zhou Wenhan, Mickey Cheong, pictured above, who are aged between 23 and 25. One will graduate as an engineer, another from computer technology and the other a quantitative finance analyst. They met on a one-year exchange programme to Silicon Valley. Together they have established 2359 Media. 2359Media.com truly makes use of open platform technology on smartphones and provides a tremendous targeted advertising opportunity for those in travel and hospitality. In their demonstration they showed a map of a huge mall in Singapore presented on an iPhone. Say you were lost and wanted to make your way to McDonald’s, it would show you a line direction from your current position to the nearest McDonald’s store. But along your way, as you passed various stores, an advert would pop up on your screen offering you a discount coupon at Burger King. You may change your mind about your destination. The commercial advantage of this highly targeted advertising opportunity that is geo-proximity based. It provides a rich media experience for making shopping decisions. The electronic coupon offers are collected by the advertiser which, when collated give valuable return on investment information. It also allows smaller retailers to compete effectively with larger, known brands. The company as yet has no venture capital investment and has not established a website, but they plan to go live on April 1, with a product offering. |
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