Armchair Theorist

So what the heck is an unconference?

Wikipedia defines it as a “facilitated, face-to-face, and participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose.” It further adds: “The term ‘unconference’ has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.”

Armed with nothing else besides that bit of knowledge, I really didn’t know what to expect when I went to attend my first Unconference event organized by E27 this past weekend.

The conference fees certainly were low ($10), but it did have a sponsored presentation by Microsoft, which was unsurprising to me. Oh well, I guess you need the latter if you want the former.

But most importantly, I was pleasantly surprised at the vibrancy, content, and the level of interaction that was offered at the event.

The event has already been covered quite well in the blogosphere by a bunch of folks already, including Singapore Entrepreneurs, Claudia, Daniel Goh, Chin Yong and Hisham. However, as a blogger, we always have more opinions to pile on, so here are some of my takeaways from the event:

1. For the longest time, I used to be quite pessimistic about the vibrancy of Singapore’s consumer web sector and Singaporean’s passion for entrepreneurship. However, after this past weekend, I am both encouraged and cautiously optimistic that we can achieve a sustainable ecosystem here to support technology start ups, as well as getting them the funding they need to scale. The passion is apparent from the attendees, and an event like the Unconference serves as excellent positive reinforcement to let people know that there are other like-minded individuals out there. However, Singapore needs more events like this. Two or three events a year won’t be nearly enough if we want to create the perpetual “aura of optimism and invincibility” that surrounds everyone in Silicon Valley, including developers, VCs and founders.
2. For a Microsoft-sponsored event, I was quite surprised that they got slammed quite bad during the Q&A session of the keynote presentation. Does this happen at every Microsoft-sponsored event? Anyway, the keynote was pretty interesting, and kudos to Microsoft for sneakily showcasing their Silverlight and SSDS technology within the pitch.
3. Half a day was way too short for this kind of event. There was easily enough content and enthusiasm floating around to make this a full day event. How about increasing the fees to $20 next year, and catering some simple lunch?
4. I attended two breakout sessions (Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media), and both were fascinating in their own right. I contributed more in the former, and learned a lot from the latter. The conversations in both sessions were vibrant and fast-paced… once folks were able to overcome the initial inertia. Again, the sessions could have gone on much longer, but we were constrained by time and had to cut short. Oh, and for those of you who were wondering, I was the guy in the white shirt from IBM.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with and network with a bunch of nice folks, including James Ong from Origami-Frontiers and Leon and Wayne from Techsailor. They are all cool dudes who know their stuff.

I will definitely attend Unconference again next year. Great job, E27!

Startup Pitches

You didn’t think I would finish this post without mentioning the 10 startup pitches, did you?

Anyway, here are my capsule reviews of all 10 startups that gave their pitch after the keynote. I know there were many other startups that attended the event but did not do a pitch (like Yum.sg and Eteract), but I will restrict my comments only to the 10 startups which did speak.

For each startup, I will also offer my opinion on how I feel their future prospects are (either promising, on the fence, or challenging). Like my ex-boss and mentor Thomas Choong told me: always ask yourself when evaluating a startup - who is going to pay for all of this?

Anyway, these are only my opinions, and should be taken as such. All of the founders are probably all much smarter than me, and I’m just an armchair theorist spewing drivel.

So here it goes, in order…

1. GoThere - A Google Maps street directory mashup with a mind-boggling simple, yet functional UI. A worthy successor to Streetdirectory.com as well as direct competitor to local sites such as ShowNearby. Fulfills my three main criteria for mapping sites very well, although the user-generated content index is still quite small. My Take - ON THE FENCE. My guess is that GoThere will have to sell advertising, but can they do so in a way that doesn’t compromise their simple UI? Look at what a mess the Streetdirectory.com UI evolved into over time! And location-based advertising is still trying to prove itself as a viable business model, unlike other forms of established online advertising. Also, I’m always a bit weary of startups that are too overly dependent on a particular service for their core functionality, like Google Maps in this case.
2. Scratone - Cool technology which can create random hip-hop ring tones based on your voice recording and a backing track. Business model is to let users create and buy the ringtones online. Unfortunately only supports hip-hop music at the moment, and restricted to royalty free backing tracks. My Take - PROMISING, but only as a niche web service that you just leave there to generate a modest revenue. Not optimistic about potential for growth. Will have to try and support other genres of music besides just hip-hop. I think Scratone may be better off as a potential aquisition target by a telco or traditional media company.
3. HomeSpace - Next generation real estate site primarily designed for home buyers. Slickest and most functional UI of all the Singapore real estate sites on the market today, although still got a few kinks to work out. Like GoThere, also heavily dependent on Google Maps. HomeValue is an absolute killer feature. My Take - PROMISING. Two possible revenue streams that it needs to implement in the future: 1) sell premium listings to real estate agents or sellers. 2) Implement the broker model and take a small cut for all transactions happening via HomeSpace.
4. Widgeo.us - “Universal cross-channel communications platform” as described by the founders. Killer feature is the support of third party applications, which makes it more of a universal multi-channel “command prompt” more than anything else. CTO U-Zyn Chua (of Ping.sg fame) told me that the business model is to sell tagline ads and their technology to companies. My Take - ON THE FENCE. This is essentially a platform play, and Widgeo.us will live or die based on how many third party applications it has. And as a multi-endpoint messaging platform, I sincerly hope that it can scale under load and does not suffer the teething performance problems that Twitter is going through now.
5. Phlook - Hey! Our first ASP.NET startup today! Basically a Flickr clone but uses a multi-function flash-based viewer and a concept of organizing photos based on storyboards. My Take - CHALLENGING. With established players such as Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and SmugMug, online photo sharing is a very difficult market to challenge in. Because of the Flash-based viewer, I couldn’t find a way to download photos as JPG or PNG within Phlook, which is a very serious oversight if it’s true. The Flash viewer also stamps the photos with a Phlook watermark when zooming, which is annoying, and the storyboard concept is also replicable in other photo sharing services. I don’t see the unique value proposition that Phlook brings to the table.
6. Podfire - Production company which produces and hosts videocasts online. Currently running five shows on its blog-like website, including one of my favorites, The Geek Goddess Show. My Take - PROMISING, but just like traditional media, revenue will have to come from product placement, sponsorships, tie-ins, and good ‘ol advertising.
7. Zopim - Provides a live chat widget for online business sites. UI is solid, analysis and profiling capabilities comparable to Google Analytics, and everything works through the web browser. Business model will be to share sales commissions with online businesses, although I’m not sure how are they going to keep track of this. My Take - ON THE FENCE. This doesn’t seem like something new, and the barrier to entry for new competitors seems quite low to me. It’s also easy for customers to switch to other providers quite easily.
8. Qweki - Search mashup that aggregates search results for text, video, images and everything together on one screen. Allows users to chat with other searchers in realtime and allows users to customize search results by voting up/down results, removing results, and flagging results as inappropriate adult content. UI is a bit messy, and seems a bit unfinished to me right now. Potentially suffering from kitchen sink syndrome. My Take - CHALLENGING. Essentially a metasearch engine, which is so 2001. What’s the business model? I also have some concerns whether it will be able to scale or not, since their search results are not their own, but based on external indexes. But yet for every personalized search they have to apply personalization to each search result set. All in all - every search operation will be a very expensive task for the server.
9. PatSnap - Intellectual Property (IP) solutions provider which basically created an annotated database of patents in the US and Europe which describes them in plain English instead of patent mumbo-jumbo legalese. Over 200,000 product descriptions in their human-edited patent database. My Take - ON THE FENCE. Is it cheaper to spend the time to do your own patent research using PatSnap or hire a patent lawyer to do it for you? And is there really a big market in patent research tools? Most of the companies who need to research and file patents regularly are huge companies like IBM and Microsoft which no doubt has their own patent team doing this stuff.
10. Hibernator - Interesting technology which in a nutshell allows you to “hibernate” and restore your desktop across different PCs by uploading application state to Hibernator’s servers via the Internet. My Take - CHALLENGING. In this mobile world today where most people work on laptops they bring everywhere anyway, how many of you will be willing to pay for such a service? I know I won’t. So what market segment or user base are they targeting anyway? Are there really still folks who regularly need to work at home and at the office who aren’t issued a work laptop?

The last word: If I were a VC and I absolutely must invest in one of the 10 startups above and nothing else, I will have to say I will choose… HomeSpace.

Update: Be Like Doerr also penned down some thoughts on the potential of these startups.