From CommunicAsia 2008 to Crunch Network Meetup in Zouk

This week, Singapore hosted the CommunicAsia 2008 in the exhibition halls of Expo. Two days back, I visited the exhibition since the admission is free for anyone. The exhibition encompassed the EnterpriseIT 2008, Broadcast Asia 2008 and Interactive Me as well. Of course, Samsung took the occasion to launch their new smart phone, Omnia in this exhibition. The same day which I visited the exhibition, I managed to arrange a last minute Crunch Network Singapore meet up in Zouk. The meeting is with Greg Kumparak, the MobileCrunch Editor from TechCrunch. So, here are some of the pictures following from the exhibition to the evening meeting.

The entire exhibition took up all 7 exhibition halls. Once you reached there, you have to go all the way to Hall 2 for registration. Since the admission is free, the requirement is to fill up a form and get a visitor pass. They split up the passes for both local and global, and it is pretty quick to get into the exhibition. First, you will pass through all the local IT enteprises in Singapore, and once you crossed into the next hall, you will see the IDA exhibition booth with the layout of the Singapore 2015 plan for information technology. Given that the goal is to encourage business to business interactions, the different players (small medium enterprises to multi-national corporations) can communicate with each other to see if any form of cooperation would happen. In any case, some of the start-ups from Thymos Capital are here for the exhibition under the MDA booth, for example, Widgeous.

A few interesting exhibits crossed my path. One of them is the sports car which SingTel used for marketing the first Singapore Grand Prix event in September 2008. Other than the sports car skinned with a SingTel logo along with the other few telecommunications companies in the region owned by them, there is also a wardrobe where you will see the gear of a Grand Prix driver. In the exhibition, they also set up two driving simulators for people to try out driving a race car. You can definitely people crowding around. I was told that the same car is also exhibited in the SingTel centre near Kiliney Road, Singapore.

While I moved around, you can see the companies releasing their new mobile or smart phones. Definitely, the blackberries and Samsung's new smart phone, the Omnia were presented in the respective booths of the companies. I often thought of a blackberry is a glorified email device and telephone, otherwise, it is not really that much of a device. While I was trying to get my hands to look at the Omnia, the whole place was totally crowded. Since I am not planning to get any smart phone other than the iPhone 3G, I figured that I can give it a miss. I did get the chance to look at it later at Zouk, where I actually met the PR team for the Omnia from the United States. So, in the end, I still managed to get a look at the Omnia in the Crunch Network Gathering 2008.

Definitely, I got a glimpse in the Yahoo! booth and the focus for them in this exhibition is on widgets and internet applications. Of course, there is a slight twist towards the mobile. Given the recent Microsoft fiasco to threaten a hostile takeover till Google striking up a partnership, Yahoo! is now relatively a weaker player in the Internet industry. I did recently hear about the Yahoo! is relaunching their email services that has the domain names of @ymail.com or @rocketmail.com. Still, they have gotten to do better if they are thinking of competing against Google's gmail. Still, Yahoo! has a significant market share in Asia. It would be interesting to see if Google's entry into Asia might change the dynamics between these two companies. At the end of the exhibition, for some of the companies which are selling mobile phones and other forms of digital devices, be it just me after going to the PC Show last week, I find that some of these companies are transported from one exhibition to the other. Definitely, I did manage to find the CNBC booth where they interviewed the industry leaders about their thoughts on the IT industry this week.

In any case, the evening was the Crunch Network gathering at Zouk. Well, I have talked about what happened there. So, since a picture paints a thousand words, I will just leave the photo for the gathering of the local web community and the Greg here.

Related Links:
Le Byzantin3 Court, Samsung Omnia Launches at CommunicAsia 2008

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