Ladies and Gentlemen, e27 is hosting a exclusive meet-up session of Startup founders with James Hong, serial-investor and co-founder of one of the defining dating sites of this era – Hot or Not, which logs about 20 Million page views per day! Am sure none of us need any introduction to this site. Started by two young UC Berkley graduates,  Hot or Not went ahead to sell for a rumored $20 million in 2008. Annual revenue was estimated at $5 million, with net profits of $2 million. He’s also an investor in Slide, Mochi Media, Raptr, Crunchyroll, BitTorrent, Frappr, OneSeason, and multiple other startups.

Meet the man behind this startup and get to hear his stories and insights. Also learn from his perspectives from being on both sides of the spectrum, as an entrepreneurs and as an investor.

Due to venue constraints and to ensure quality conversation, we are limiting the attendance to only 30 founders. If you are a startup founder and interested in attending this meetup, RSVP NOW!

Meetup Details

Date/Time : Thursday, March 11th 2010 / 6pm onwards

Venue: Garag3, NUS

RSVP : First 30 people to RSVP/comment on this post!

Looking forward to free flow of great conversations and loads of fun!

[Picture Courtesy: Wired]

Socialwok - The social network and project management software for enterprise is one of the first 50 applications in this nascent marketplace. One of the unconference’09 featured startup and TechCrunch50 demo pit winner, this Singapore-based startup offers collaboration network on Google Apps to share ideas, files, web links, Google Docs, Google Calendar with your workforce and external parties.

Scott McMullan, Partner Lead for Google Apps adds “We are very excited to have Socialwok in the Google Apps Marketplace, Through the Google Apps Marketplace, software vendors like Socialwok are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps, allowing IT administrators to leverage the benefits of cloud computing and extend Google Apps to meet more of their business needs. We are happy to offer Socialwok to the millions of Google Apps users who have embraced the cloud.”

Some of the details from the event include:

- 20% revenue share with Google

- Over 50 partners for Google Apps, including Aviary, Expensify, Intuit, and others.

- One time fee of $100 to Google to get into the AppStore

You can watch live streaming of the event here.

Well before I start let me clarify one thing – “Chase your dream, money will follow” – is an important principle that every entrepreneur should follow. It is very important to build the product/application right and build the audience first – if not monetization is irrelevant.  That said, it is also important to keep monetization at the back of your mind if not from day 1, from day 2 at least. Though building and running an application seems to be pretty cheap nowadays (with all the Cloud Computing services you can literally run for a few pennies), there is no such thing as a zero cost application, and moreover, a successful and profitable application needs a solid monetization strategy. Without one you wouldn’t be able to sustain the costs associated with growing your application for a very long time.

Unfortunately, most of the applications today rely heavily, in one way or the other, on “advertising”. In this model, the application and services/functionality offered by the application are provided for free to the customers, while you charge advertisers for providing the “eye-balls” of your customers to them through their ads. When the customer does something more than just look at the ad, for example clicking on the ad or buying the product/service through the ad, you would get more revenue than the typical impressions (CPI, CPC, CPM, CPA, CTR, etc.).  But as we all know, the revenues based on advertising are declining, simply due to the increase in the supply. Contextual advertising might yield better revenues but at the risk of losing customer confidence in some cases (e.g. privacy concerns).

Fortunately there are other models that have been implemented and proven to be successful in generating revenues in different kinds of applications and products.

• A subscriptions model is where you charge your customers a flat membership fee (often charged weekly, monthly, yearly, or for lifetime) to use your application, services, or content.
• A pay as you use model is where you charge your customers based on the usage of your application – time, content, resources used, etc. without a fixed flat fee. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a good and very successful example of Pay only for what you use.
• A free to use, pay to Services model is where you provide your application for free but charge your customers for services like customization, training, and other value added services. A good example are the companies that provide value added services for the Open Source software (ex. Linux Operating System, Drupal, MySQL, Java, etc.).
• A freemium model is where you give away a basic version of your application for free and charge your customers for an enhanced version of your application that provides more extended feature set or content. There are several good examples of using the freemium model in the industry. Flickr, Skype, Newsgator, Trillian, Google App Engine, etc..
• And last but not least the traditional eCommerce model which is usually about selling of products (digital/physical) online through your applications. Obviously we are not talking about selling products at the scale of big retailers (like Amazon & Walmart) out there, but most of the applications could provide ways for its customers to buy products (digital or physical) that are related to the application or content or services it is offering. A good example is a social gaming application that could provide merchandise like T-Shirts, Coffee mugs, Photo frames, etc. with its brand name on it. As your application grows its audience base and as its brand becomes more known among customers, you can generate revenue based on your brand in this way too.

As you can see, in most cases the monetization model really depends on what your application is providing. Also in some cases it is very important (as your monetization strategy gets more closely bound to the functionality – for example as in the pay as you use model where you would want to keep track of everything the customer is doing) to start thinking about the way you are going to monetize in the future during your application design and implementation phase itself. Otherwise you might be forced to redesign and/or re-implement your application when the times comes to turn the monetization switch on. And when you add different platforms and devices on which your application is being offered, it would obviously turn into a very costly affair.

Another important aspect of monetization, as you might guess, is the payments platform itself. There are several online payments platforms and solutions available out there in the industry and it becomes vital to choose one that not only provides the payments functionality in the way that you would want but also is economical in terms of the transaction and monthly fees.

PayPal as you might have heard recently, has opened up its Payments Platform (called PayPal X Platform) that provides the flexibility, security, fraud and risk management, better transaction fees (micropayments, services, etc.), and moreover, the stability, performance and availability all across the world that every application, no matter how big or small it is, requires. We strongly believe that empowering the developers with APIs that can be adapted into their applications and function in the way they want will help them come up with better monetization models that help not just to chase their dreams but to achieve them. Please visit www.x.com to learn more about PayPal X Platform, the various Adaptive APIs offered by the platform, and the information about how to get started.

Happy monetizing your application !

Photo360

As part of the contest, competitors take pictures of attraction sites in Singapore and use Microsoft Photosynth to create interactive 3D experiences which will be eventually available on Bing Maps. There are exciting prizes up for grabs worth SGD5000.

For more information and registration, visit http://tinyurl.com/photo360.

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

The video got featured across various popular portals like Lifehacker and Gizmodo. After loads of difficulty, we were finally able to get hold of Dr.Ping Tan, One of the main man behind this intuitive app. Dr. Tan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National University of Singapore. In this exclusive interview with e27, he shared about some of the technology behind this application.

Imaging Technology

Dr.Tan’s primary research interests has always included image based concepts. The technology behind Sketch2Photo involves two different components: Image search and Image stitching.

Image search consists of querying the myriad search engines that include Google, Bing, Yahoo and even Flickr. After which a filtering mechanism sets in, to remove the unwanted images. This is where Dr. Tan mentioned that in this application there are high false negatives and low false positives i.e the probability of the right images being discarded is higher than the wrong images being used.

Hybrid Blending

After the image search, comes the image stitching part which he refers to as hybrid blending. He capture images of similar lighting condition and illumination properties to blend cohesively. This particular technology generates numerical measurement for the final blending result and this blending score is used to optimize combination of different images.

Application Status

With this technology, he is not planning to make it into a software application as of now and has only recently filed the patent for it and has no motivation to commercialize it. When asked about the current status of the project, he mentioned that right now he just has “messy” research code and his students are working on a live demo of the software.

I for one can’t wait to sketch this and see what turns out :P

Background

Brad Greenspan’s resume has the quintessential entrepreneurial story behind it. Having studied in UCLA, he started his first company from his dorm room called Palisades Capital. He went ahead to be the founder of one of the largest and popular social network- Myspace which was sold to NewsCorp in 2007. His other sojourns include Broadwebasia and Liveuniverse.

Investment Interests

His investment portfolio is interestingly diverse. Having invested from green tech to consumer web, he is definitely not focused on any particular vertical. After investing in Michigan-based Draths corporation, he feels that Asia has a huge potential in the green tech market. He has previously invested in an previous Asian startup called Accumo, which was focused on meta search and clustering technology. Accumo then became part of Broad Web Asia to penetrate the China search market and the product ended up winning a Red Herring Award.

Challenges Facing Asia

When asked about the challenges facing Asian startups, Brad felt that the big issue in Asia is raising capital, but there was light at the end of the tunnel with the Singapore government doing its bit by making money available to startups through its various incubator and entrepreneurship schemes. The other mitigating factor in Asia is the lesser monetization opportunities. He finds that it’s hard to find a strategic fit between companies in Asia to provide value in terms of traffic or ad revenue. This is why he feels that with different categories of startups under his incubator, they can generate value for each other and create internal channels for revenue generation.

Well, it will be interesting to see how Brad will take advantage of the robust oppurtunities in Asia to give a boost to the startups here. We have our eyes and ears open for what are his other three investments in Asia and you should definitely watch out for this space to find out more.

[Picture Courtesy: www.smh.com.au]

Erwan will discuss alternative ways to monetize mobile development, focusing on B2B applications for enterprise clients. Erwan recently started Bitsmedia Pte Ltd (www.bitsmedia.com), a Singapore based “Mobile Application Factory” that focuses on developing iPhone applications for corporate customers. Trilingual in French, English and Indonesian, Erwan holds a double Master’s degree in Business Studies and Telecommunication Sciences and has spent the past 22 years between Europe and South-East Asia, where he worked as a CTO for both internet startups (Spray in France, Soundbuzz in Singapore) and multinational corporations (Alcatel, Akamai and Vivendi).

Light refreshment and networking to follow.

Also, join other like-minded individual to explore the potential that mobile Internet unleashes at the upcoming series

Event Details

Date / Day: 26 March 2010 (Friday)

Time: 4 – 6pm

Location: BuzzCity (Yellow Pages Building)

Address: 1 Lor 2 Toa Payoh Yellow Pages Building #02-03 Singapore 319637

Dress Code: Casual

Email baoyi@buzzcity.com to RSVP as seats are limited on a first-come first-served basis. The closing date is 19 March (Friday).

Tribefish is like a customized and personalized video discovery engine, that sifts through all the web platforms and video sites to deliver the most personalized experience to you. The emphasis is on exploration and discovery, not so much on search though. While the current website is nowhere close to what they promise to deliver, they are clearly serious on improving their service and providing the best user experience possible. They are offering, as  bait, a Flip MinoHD 60 mins camera to 10 deserving winners who can provide useful feedback on how they can use their service. Do note that the service is raw, and be ready to play around with a system that is hardly ready for launch but yearning for feedback to improve.

Editors Note: PayPal Singapore will be holding their PayPal X Developer Open House event on March 18th 2009.

PayPal – the big behemoth of online payment is all set to change the way we pay. Will they be able to bring that change? We don’t know. How will they bring about change? Definitely, with the help of developers.  In July 2009, PayPal announced PayPal X, an initiative to provide 3rd party app developers with tools and opening up their API to integrate their payment systems into various web applications.

By opening up their system, they have provided much-needed flexibility to the payment ecosystem within the applications. In order to get more apps to migrate to their payment system, PayPal is holding a developer challenge which will incentivise more developers to use their flexible and easy-to-develop platform.

The PayPal X developer challenge is one of a kind contest, that rewards innovative apps using PayPal’s API. The first-prize winners will receive: US $50,000 cash + up to US $50,000 in waived transaction fees

And the second prize winners will be receiving US $25,000 + up to $25,000 in waived transaction fees

ZiYong, founder of StreamMedia is one of the finalists in the competition. His team has developed MoVend – an application that does inventory and payment management. Through this app, developers can sell virtual goods, subscription and licenses of their mobile application easily, without much hassle.

There are some other pretty cool apps as well like, PoxPay – an app where you can charge your account with your voice. PoxPay uses voice biometric technology to uniquely identify and authorize purchases or money transfers and to authorize a payment, PoxPay, we’ll place a call to your enrolled phone and ask you to repeat a series of digits. If your spoken words match the voice imprint on file, the payment will go through.

There are hordes of such  interesting applications among the finalists. Make sure you check it out and also, don’t forget to vote for your favorite one NOW!

Jeff Stewart
Founder & CEO, Urgent Career
Description: Jeff Stewart is Founder & CEO of Urgent Career, a company that is revolutionizing the way companies screen and assess sales talent. Jeff is also the Founder and Chairman of Mimeo.com, the largest service to print, bind and deliver documents directly from your computer. Jeff is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, having founded over a half dozen companies in his career, which combined to employ over 600 people.

Ron Wiener
Chief Mechanic, Venture Mechanics, LLC
Description: Serial entrepreneur and angel investor; currently Chief Mechanics at incubator Venture Mechanics, LLC in Seattle. Founder and CEO of five investor-backed companies including Earth Class Mail, SnapNames.com, PrintBid.com, Distribution Sciences Corp and Azure Technology. Have incubated more than a dozen startups since 1998. Starred on Startup Junkies TV show for its first season (see it on hulu or itunes).

Will Bunker
Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of One-and-Only (became Match.com)
Description: Will Bunker is the co-founder of the online dating service that became Match.com, the world’s largest personals site. In 1996 Will and a partner raised $90,000 from angel investors to start online personals pioneer One-and-Only.com. In late 1999 they sold Dallas-based One-and-Only for $45 million to Ticketmaster Online/City Search, where it was rebranded Match.com.

Michael Diamant
CEO, Skip Hop
Description: Michael Diamant is CEO of Skip Hop, founded in 2003 by him and his wife, Ellen. As new parents living in New York City, they were surprised by how few products resonated with the urban lifestyle they were used to. Michael, a veteran Internet entrepreneur, saw an opportunity to move into a new type of business, creating products and a brand that spoke to parents just like themselves.

Take a multi-billion dollar digital marketing industry, add industry veterans, mix it well with technology and sprinkle it with an industry award and you get an exciting and rapidly growing company – Pinstorm, a company that originated in India and has its APAC headquarters in Singapore.

Pinstorm was founded in 2005 by Mahesh Murthy, who was Country Head of Channel V, and also runs Seedfund, an early-stage venture capital fund in India. They were one of the 31 asian companies to have won the Red Herring Top 100 Global award this year.

Now, Red Herring awards are usually bestowed upon innovative technology companies which was why, it piqued my interest to see how a digital marketing firm got into this space and was recognized as a technology firm. They are also, the only digital brand management firm to have won this award. I spoke to Geetha Sethi, APAC head of Pinstorm to understand this interesting concoction of web products with digital marketing services.

Technology

Pinstorm provides Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Interactive Digital Display Advertising, Social Media Marketing Campaigns and Online Reputation Management services to their clients. In order to provide these services, they have developed a broad spectrum of proprietary tools in-house.

For example, they have developed a tool called LiveBanner, which falls under the category of Interactive Digital Display Advertising to help clients display their services across various platforms. This tool was used by CNN to display real-time news that engages the user. This banner could be seen on Yahoo, MSN, LinkedIn and host of other portals.

BroadWords is another proprietary technology that lets them deploy ad campaigns across different channels with low cost. This tool helps in finding out relevant yet low-priced key words for the clients. To cite a use-case, one of their clients required a particular set of keywords that were essential to them. Even after bidding for 21 cents a click, they were at a low position on the page and were hardly getting more than 1000 clicks a month. That’s when they used BroadWords to identify what they call “virgin” keywords, which were being bid for only 5 cents. Afterwhich, one keyword alone generated about 8000 clicks a month.

Similary they have host of other technologies that does personal searching, twitter monitoring, geo tracking, competitive analysis, social media monitoring and a lot more technology driven services.

Their clients and partners list is nothing less than impressive and are spread across different verticals. Some of their clients include DBS, HSBC bank, NUS, INSEAD, ebay, National Geographic.

Digital marketing products Vs Digital marketing firms

In the digital marketing/advertising landscape, we have product-based companies that cater to a particular need for their clients. ThoughtBuzz, JamiQ are examples of such companies that focus solely on social media brand monitoring. Also, products like myADengine compete indirectly in this space.  Can these companies co-exist or will they cannibalize each other?

Firms such as Pinstorm provides a service to their clients and products is a part of their offering. Their main value proposition lies in providing holistic solutions that solve a particular need. Whereas, digital marketing product companies are selling a product first with consulting services as an add-on. There is a fine-line between the two and is hard to say which approach is better. It is largely dependent on the varied needs of the clients and their budgets for such services.

In my opinion with regards to Pinstorm, each individual technology does not stand out as innovative or anything to write home about. But, it’s the way they cleverly integrate all the pieces of software to provide a holistic solution to their clients, that sets them apart.

[img courtesy: Dynamic Business]

The deadlines for Paris and Singapore have been extended to next Sunday, March 7th and the deadlines for Denver have been extended to Sunday, April 4th. For those of you still keen on applying for their programs, you can follow the links below.

Singapore: http://www.founderinstitute.com/apply/11
Paris: http://www.founderinstitute.com/users/new?target=10
Denver:  http://www.founderinstitute.com/apply/9

RADIOactive
Rate them here: http://www.ultimatestartupspace.com.sg/#/rate-entry/1

Amnesia
Rate them here: http://www.ultimatestartupspace.com.sg/#/rate-entry/7

Bon Soir Dark Dining
Rate them here: http://www.ultimatestartupspace.com.sg/#/rate-entry/3

Hemeryx – The Bar that Connects
Rate them here: http://www.ultimatestartupspace.com.sg/#/rate-entry/1

OliveScreens
Rate them here: http://www.ultimatestartupspace.com.sg/#/rate-entry/5

If you are keen to check out the rest of the entries, follow this link to the gallery.

Great coverage of the event by Yahoo >> Link here

Interested participants can sign up at the following sites:

Singapore
Date: Tuesday, 9th March 2010
Location: Meritus Mandarin Orchard, Ballroom 1
Details: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/singapore

Kuala Lumpur:
Date: Thursday, 11th March 2010
Location: Hilton Hotel, Ballroom A, Kuala Lumpur
Details: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/malaysia

More Details: http://cse-sea.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-analytics-master-class-is-back.html

From what I heard, last years class in Singapore (which was the first in Southeast Asia) was way oversubscribed, hence I think this year’s one will be too. So do sign up early!

The agenda for the Singapore event is attached below for easy reference. See ya there!