Interview with Ray Koh of PickaPoken – Bringing Poken to Singapore

If you are in the tech space and haven’t yet heard of Poken, you must be living under a rock. The little digital social business card, with its cutesy designs, reminds one of the once famous Tamagotchi, only much more useful, and targeted at business users. While Poken was catching on fast in Europe and Japan, the little device still hasn’t reached Singapore shores en masse yet, till Ray set up PickaPoken to distribute Poken in Singapore. We caught Ray to find out more about the process of bringing Poken to Singapore.

Hi Ray, thanks for being with us today and thanks for bringing Poken to Singapore! First, help explain what Poken is for those who have never heard of it.

Poken is your ‘social business card.’ it’s an easy way to share your contact details and online social network profiles with the people you meet in the real world. Just tap two Pokens together – high4! – and you’re connected.

Poken Explained from Poken on Vimeo.

Can you give us a bit of a background of how successful Poken has been and where?

Poken was first launched in Europe and Japan and later in the US. You can find people actively Poken-ing in events in these region.

Can you tell us a bit of your background?

My background is in mobile & internet technology. I joined Bubble Motion in 2003, a leader in providing “Bubble Talk” or VoiceSMS service to mobile network carriers. I was the first member of the Bubble Motion team. I built the first version of the VoiceSMS platform and integrated it into carrier network infrastructure and deployed the product in 8 different countries.

In 2008, me and Sunil Coushik (my partner) started working on various ideas and projects in Bluency. We looked at pokens in July 2009 and we were interested in the API development around pokens. In Nov 2009 we brought Poken into Singapore. We think Poken can change the way people exchange contacts between the online and real world. A great solution for both individuals as well as businesses

(Check out our interview with Ray’s partner, Sunil Coushik of Ogywawa.)

On your company, Bluency‘s website, it is written that you “build [your] own products”. Can you help us clarify your relationship and role in bringing Poken to Singapore?

Our plan is to look at interesting products like Poken and find ways to add value to them. We plan to develop interesting applications on top of Poken API.