In Conversation with Alfred Chong, CEO of 121View

A few weeks ago, we profiled the global markets that Singapore-headquartered, digital signage company 121VIEW has penetrated into.

This time, we managed to speak with Alfred Chong, CEO of the company, who sees 121VIEW’s continual growth and success as tied to the advertising industry. A serial entrepreneur, he lived and worked on companies in several countries such as the US, Malaysia and of course Singapore.

For his first company, Alfred borrowed USD 1k and grew it to one doing USD 8m, eventually selling the company. Find out his story here.

Hi Alfred, thank you for joining us at SGEntrepreneurs. You have been named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by the Singapore American Business Association and called a “visionary” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Can you tell us about the startups you have worked with prior to 121VIEW?

Yes – this is quite sometime ago – when I was living in the US. I returned from the US back to Asia in 1999. During that time I had initially lived in Malaysia and moved back to Singapore circa 2005.

In Malaysia, I had initially focused on the energy sector. The most notable startup – in which I was a founding member was for a company called Iev Energy. The company focuses on delivering virtual pipelines and gas into stranded areas. There is so much to talk about this company but the information is embedded into the website. I remain a shareholder of the parent company – iev-group even today.

How did you manage to borrow USD 1000 for your very first company that was eventually sold to CompuCom Systems Inc and how did you use the money?

After completing my MBA, at the University of San Francisco, the advent of Personal computers came about. I had borrowed USD 1,000 to start a garage styled PC business that grew to an USD 8m company, employing over 80 professionals. We had offices principally in the Bay area.

How would you differentiate 121VIEW from other digital signage players?

There are hundreds of players out in the market today. Our differentiation lies in our software. Built from the ground up and on linux, we pride ourselves in being able to offer the industry a fully integrated Digital Signage software with audience measurement attributes. This may sound trivial but we are only one of two companies that own our IP on both fronts. Most of the current DS companies have “bolted on” the audience measurement capabilities from one of our competitors. However, we are the only one that runs on linux and thus offer complete flexibility to the enduser on how they would want their DS system to operate under.

Why go into the digital signage industry for this current venture?

In any venture, you always look at the market sizing, its potential and see how you can build a business that can address this market.

Global Ad spend in 2009 at US$450bn, with prediction of growing to US$457bn in 2010.- according to Zenith Optimedia. Even though outdoor media is the smallest percentage – about 1.7%, it has the second fastest growth rate after Internet Advertising.

Google‘s powerful information mining tools allow us to dig into and access invaluable data which is coveted by marketers but was very expensive to obtain in the past. Google Trends and its big brother Google Insights provide a glimpse into the power of Google’s incredible query database.