Thus, we rolled up our sleeves and threw a mini party for all NOC students, past and current, at our brand-new office at San Francisco. That night was a huge gathering for NOC students. The iLEAD students have just arrived the Bay Area for their two-week Overseas Study Mission (OSM) at the Silicon Valley. A few of our NOC alumni also turned up to share their experiences of working at the Bay Area.

Jay Vasudevan, from NCSV11, shared his “One Man & A Suitcase” story of bringing ‘Brandtology’ to the States. There was a lot of hustling and networking, and hard times like living off the air mattress from the living room of the Semantics3 guys. The founders of Semantics3, Varun & Viswa, had their fair share of hardship, from getting rejected by various incubators and investors, to finally graduating from Y Combinator, one of the best startup incubators, and closing their first enterprise customer. There was also Tian Wei, a NCSV alumnus, who gave us insights from the other spectrum of the daily startup news we see. He said that acquisition by large companies is not always a good piece of news, because there is this thing calls the ‘preferred shares’, investors are always first to receive their returns. That was a real lesson he has picked up from the startup world. More amazing stories were also shared by other alumni including Quek Shu Yang, Ryan Wong, Tay Kah Hong, Shilpa and Amanda.

We have a new office!

With plans of expanding the NOC program and sending more students to the Bay Area, NUS Enterprise has been looking for more opportunities up north. Co-working with Infocomm Investments and Singtel Innov8, we have set up a new office at 599 2nd St, San Francisco. This would only mean more partnerships formed with startups based in the city, giving us more opportunities to enroll our NUS students to this program!

TechinAsia has covered this story here: https://www.techinasia.com/singapore-block-71-san-francisco/

Photo Gallery

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On the night of thanksgiving, we were glad to be invited to Pam&Sam’s place for a heartwarming home-cooked dinner! The dining table was spread with sumptuous food and drinks, with portion enough to feed thirty. We are really glad to have met Pamela and Samuel, who are like our parents overseas. They have seen many batches of NCSV students come and go, but the love and care they show to us never dwindles. They treat us like how they treat their own children. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Black Friday was not just about cheap deals, it is also about post-thanksgiving turkey dinner. With a full turkey intact, Allan and housemates spontaneously threw a mini-potluck at night, inviting many fellow Singaporeans who had just arrived at the Bay Area. It was almost a networking dinner.

Mini Potluck on Black Friday!

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You can visit OSU’s website at http://www.overseassingaporean.sg/ and their facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/osl.unitedstates?ref=stream

Of course, if you still haven’t read Dr Leslie Tay’s blog, do so at http://ieatishootipost.sg/ right nowand find out the next makan place!

Dr Leslie Tay and NCSV!

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For the full article by Angelhack, organizer of Money 20/20 Hackathon 2014, please read http://www.angelhack.com/recap-money-2020-thats-what-i-want/

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Despite the hot weather and the vast amount of distance between each exhibitions, we brought back with us nuggets of information about space exploration.

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The intrapreneur who works within his company is an entrepreneur. The social entrepreneur building a non-profit is still an entrepreneur. And high school students looking to make wallets out of laminated pages of old magazines are entrepreneurs too.

And that was I had to come to terms with when I served as a judge for the 5th BUILD Annual Youth Business Plan Competition at the Oakland Technical High School. Sitting at a panel as team after team of high school students pitched their ideas, I was reminded of how entrepreneurship serves as a vehicle for change.

BUILD (www.build.org) runs the nation’s largest youth incubators with a mission of using entrepreneurship to excite and propel disengaged, low-income students through high school to college success. The high school students who were pitching their ideas were students perceived as not “college material”. The Oakland Technical High School is a public high school with a racial makeup of approximately 52% African Americans, 18% Asian and 15% Hispanics. Many of the students are from less privileged communities.

Sitting on the judges’ side of the table was a refreshing experience as I grappled with the decisions of whether an idea deserved funding. At times, their data and research were dodgy and pricing models questionable. Even as I asked difficult questions, I had to remind myself that they were high school students for whom public speaking was a new endeavour.

Yet what I saw were teams of passionate students in the process of gaining self-confidence and learning how to succeed as they pitched simple ideas such as selling snacks at football games and selling scented bags to their peers. These were ideas that were non scalable, but also ideas that would instill pride and leadership skills.

100% of BUILD’s graduates go on to enter college; 80% of them are the first in their family to go to college. Definitely impressive considering that many of these students grow up in the ghetto. The question is, can this be replicated in Singapore?

We have a similar problem in Singapore. 90% of children from families living in one to three room flats do not make it to university.

What BUILD has proved is that expectations are self-serving. Students with low expectations end up performing poorly. What makes BUILD different from existing youth business plan competitions in Singapore is its targeted approach towards underserved communities as well as easy access to mentors. The BUILD approach may be an answer towards getting more low-income children into our universities.

– Yixiang Liang, NCSV18

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But what is open source?

The first thing we have to realize is that open source is different from free software. Let’s take Internet browsers for example, all of them are free, but only about one and a half are open source. IE and Safari are free to use, but still essentially belong to Microsoft and Apple respectively. Firefox (which is the open source one) is free to use and at the same time belongs to no single entity or individual. (For the record, Chrome makes up the other half an open source browser.)

We also cannot simply assume that open source software is free to use. Sure it’s free to compile edit and run however you please, but then that means you’d be the only person in the known universe who’s running that exact version. Compatibility becomes a big issue. And for our friends who have not actually tried downloading code from a revision controlled repository, adding a feature in Java or C++, compiling the code and running the application error free, it’s not exactly as easy as you think.

Because of these aforementioned issues, more and more companies are charging for the use of stable, pre compiled versions of their open source builds for which they also provide technical and customer support. A company that uses this effectively as a business model is Pentaho, which writes a Business Intelligence Tomcat Web Application. They provide their paying customers with their latest build, exclusive user guides and access to forums but most importantly, an expert who will fix whatever goes wrong. The rest of the world, which includes me at LendingClub, is left with a heap of un-compiled Java code and perhaps a working build from a few versions ago. We are our own user guide, forum and technical support. Sometimes we even help identify bugs and solve them for the Pentaho team. A convenient way for them to use crowd sourcing to advance development!

Oh no! Software still isn’t free! Why is open source good then?

Open source provides the benefit of being able to build on each other’s work. Imagine an operating system with Windows’ functionality, OS X’s user interface and Linux’s stability. Imagine killer efficiency because we didn’t have to work out some contrived solution around some crummy patent.

Governments try to promote the development of software by granting patents and copyrights to their writers. They seem to be rewarding them exclusive rights to their own hard work, which is fair and good, but in a field as new and intangible as software, are the decision makers really qualified to judge whether a candidates’ work is novel, free from prior art and non-obvious? What copyrighting has done is to prevent the re-creation of a program through another’s hard work. This limits the ability to enhance already existing software to solve problems that are intrinsically the same but have superficial differences. Additionally, development is even more unnecessarily frustrating with all the royalty payments one has to consider. When regulation makes progress economically unviable, it’s a step in the wrong direction I say. It may work in other fields of engineering where the end product is physical, but in the world of software, it’s like having a monopoly on Pythagoras’ Theorem. Kill it with Open Source!

So, could programmers make a living in an Open Source world?

Yes, but we will have to work for our pay instead of watching discs fly off the shelf and feeling our pockets fill up. A chef is paid when he cooks, not every time someone uses his recipe. Companies will have to shift their focus from selling the consumer software to selling a service to customize software to specific needs and supporting it thereafter. And in a world where a company with better service wins, the customer also wins.

The grim reality of things is that the proprietary model is hard to break. It has been proven extremely profitable and there is much mistrust and animosity in the industry. A good first step would be to stop issuing patents. Software companies, like chefs then won’t be obliged to disclose their recipes, but if someone else figures it out on their own, they really shouldn’t be able to sue for it. Perhaps then, when we respectfully recognize each other’s efforts, we can start trying to work together. Come on, we can do it!

Open Source? Yes please!

– Gareth Gabriel Yeo, NCSV18

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