Simple is the Reason of My Heart

The Power of Unreasonable People

If you seriously want to know what type of animal social and environmental entrepreneurs are, "The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World" by John Elkington (founder of Sustainability.org and the concept of the Triple Bottom Line) & Pamela Hartigan (Manging Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship) gives a very good glimpse of how these people turn their unreasonable ideals and dreams into reality. It mirrors a famous quote by George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." This book discusses the interesting social entrepreneurship cases from Aravind Eye Center in India, the Social Stock Exchange in Brazil, ParqueSoft in Colombia and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.

Is Singapore ready for Social Entrepreneurship? Two Years later

A journalist from Channel News Asia contacted me last for a really short interview (which was published yesterday) on social entrepreneurship through Singapore Angle last Tuesday. It turns out that she was doing a feature on social entrepreneurship and found an article that I have written two years ago. So, she solicited my views on whether my position on social entrepreneurship in Singapore has changed over the last two years. Thanks to the long tail effect in the Internet, something that I advocated has finally caught some attention. I have decided to write an afterword to the original article and would hope to see social entrepreneurship (or sustainable development - rebranded by the Americans from the British who are the experts in this area) to finally take off.

Online Advertising on Blogs in Singapore & Malaysia

If you are a blogger in Singapore & Malaysia, you have a myriad of choices in deploying online advertisements other than the standard Google Ads. Most people who have deployed google ads on their blogs will know that they don't earn much from that system for good reasons. First of all, the Singapore market is small and that naturally leads to a small audience unless your blog can penetrate the markets beyond Singapore. Besides, to earn the money on Google Ads, the click through rate must be high. To get a good enough click through rate, you need to get a lot of traffic. That comes to my next point, Asians don't do a lot of click throughs. An interesting article on TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld recently revealed that click fraud has raised by 15% in 2007 and interestingly one in three clicks is click fraud. In this blog article, I will review the online advertising trends in Singapore and Malaysia based on my observations from the blogosphere. In addition, I will talk about the three companies (Advertlets, Blog2u and Nuffnang) which specialize on online advertising in Singapore and Malaysia. I have experimented each one of them on my blog and will offer some feedback and how these companies can improve.

The Illusions of Entrepreneurship by Scott A. Shane

Other than Presentation Zen, I have ordered another book which has caught my interest recently. The book entitled "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors and Policy Makers Live By", written by Scott A. Shane has not disappointed. In fact, it is a very well written book about the myths of entrepreneurship and showed some interesting and counter-intuitive results against common folklore about entrepreneurship. In my teaching of the same topic to students, I prefer to call it the dark side of entrepreneurship. Ultimately, I prefer an agnostic view of entrepreneurs. Here are some interesting issues to why I think that this is a must-read book for those out there. Before you really think of committing yourself to start a business, it might be good to learn some lessons from this book, because a lot of things you hear about are likely to anomalies rather than the norm.

Rules of Engagement for Internet Entrepreneurs starting up in Singapore

Last Tuesday, I was invited by Dr Jack Jiang from NUS School of Computing to deliver a guest lecture for his honours year course CS4260: E-Commerce Business Models. Through a meeting and several email discussions, I decided to break the one and half hours lecture into four parts: (i) The general concepts which are driving the current internet economy - the long tail, wisdom of crowds, direct micro financial transactions and a new phrase I coined for the students to remember "Cash is King but Information is Queen for Internet Businesses"; (ii) the emerging trends looking at the differences between internet companies coming out from Silicon Valley (California, US) and Zhongguancun (Beijing, China); (iii) two case studies I prepared to get the students into thinking: (i) Baidu and (ii) Second Life and HiPiHi and (iv) How to set up an internet business in Singapore. I decided to blog about the few pointers for internet entrepreneurs which I have invested, encountered and also talked to, and perhaps it might be of help for those who are thinking of setting up an internet business.

The Difficulty of Developing Venture Capital in Singapore

Recently, over a supper conversation in Holland Village, a friend made an interesting observation about entrepreneurs in Singapore, "Actually, there is entrepreneurship in Singapore, but the Singaporean entrepreneurs are not here but in overseas. The market here is just too small. If you are successful in business, you should be now in China, Vietnam or Cambodia." What he is saying is that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to set up shop in other markets. Making a few dollars in Singapore is easy, but a few million is pretty difficult. By now, if you are planning to set up a business in Singapore, you have to accept the fact that you must go global on the very first day. I thought about this for a while and come to another conclusion as to why developing venture capital is extremely difficult in Singapore. In that process, I want to sketch out an alternative model that might mitigate some of the issues involved.

Whose Idea is it anyway?

Lately, everybody seems to claim that they are founders of Facebook. In the official version, Mark Zuckerberg is considered the founder of Facebook, a online social network worth $1 billion. So, three Harvard students Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss, who are founders of ConnectU are suing him in Federal District Court in Boston, claiming that he stole the idea from them. Now, another Harvard student, Aaron J. Greenspan, yet another Harvard classmate now claims that he is the person who created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. He has implemented the system and wants to be acknowledged for coming up with the idea. So, here is a question for you, if you come up with an idea and do not implement it, does it still consider your idea if someone implements it (who have heard it from you)? Here is my opinion on the issue of ideas and implementation.

The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship

A good entrepreneur is not one who always get it right, but he is one who knows how to make all the mistakes as quickly as possible. If better, he acquires others' experiences by listening and making sure that he does not make the mistake. Hence, the way to know that is to know the dark side of entrepreneurship. We talk about some traits that might lead the entrepreneur can move to the dark side.

Entrepreneurial Popular Delusions & The Molly-Coddling of Crowds

Can we really teach entrepreneurship in Singapore? Some people thinks that it's a waste of time doing that. Some people thinks that we should teach the basic skills and let the people develop on their own. Here is my one line summary to the issue, "If I am going to teach entrepreneurship, the conventional education will not work and leads to molly-coddling. So, this is how I am going to teach it.

More Failure is Better Entrepreneurship

There is one dominant argument that the critics often lament why there is a lack of entrepreneurs in Singapore. That is atychiphobia, or in simple layman language, fear of failure. Instead of being boring by saying what critics love to do, I am going to use a simple economic principle (with the analogy of AIDS epidemic) to demonstrate why more failure is better entrepreneurship, and offer an interesting solution for those people (namely the government) who are desperate to get something kickstart here to think about.

Seperated By a Mental Bridge: Thoughts on the Iskander Development Region

Yesterday, the Malaysia-Singapore Joint Ministerial committee started their first meeting on the Iskander Development Region (IDR) in Johor Bahru. The conclusion of the first meeting leads to the committee forming four common task force groups to explore the areas (on environmental matters, boosting tourism, facilitating immigration clearance and enhancing transport links) identified by a previous meeting between Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Malaysia) and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (Singapore) during their recent Langkawi retreat. The principle of the working groups is to achieve a win-win outcome for both countries and the committee will meet every quarter to discuss further cooperation and taking stock.

An Opinion about Singaporean Business Culture

Sometime back, I was in Shanghai on a conference. During that trip, I asked a Singaporean friend (who has been working there for at least two years) to tell me more about the business culture and what are the rising industries there. He told me that the Singaporeans are better in the education sector as compared to the other sectors in Shanghai. In his opinion, Singaporean business men did not do so well against businesses from Hong Kong and Taiwan, particularly the food and beverages industry. 

Thoughts about Next Generation of Entrepreneurs in Singapore

Yesterday (7.7.7), I attended the National Youth Entrepreneurship Conference in NUS Business School organized by the Exoro team. Other than giving a talk on "Meeting Strangers 101", I also sat on a panel with Ron Sim (CEO and Founder of OSIM), Douglas Abrams (Venture Capitalist), Aileen Sim (Founder, First Meta) and Min Xuan (the incoming NUS Entrepreneurship Society President), moderated by Darius Cheung (CEO of TenCube). While listening to the other panelists and consolidating my own thoughts, I summarize a few interesting points on the challenges faced by  the next generation of entrepreneurs in Singapore.