Entrepreneurs make their presence felt at Singapore 9

Entrepreneurs, it turns out, form a large bulk of the nominees at Singapore 9, an online voting contest to recognize nine Singaporeans who have left their mark in the past year.

Previously, we wrote about Jannie Chan, founder of watch retailer The Hour Glass, as well as beauty and F&B entrepreneur Cynthia Chua, who founded Browhaus, Skinny Pizza, and others.

Now, as Yahoo! Singapore finally unveils the nominees for all categories, we’ve found more entrepreneurs in the mix. In the Youth category, there’s Adrianna Tan, who started popular Asian travel blog Popagandhi and runs her own Hackathon events. Edwin Chia, CEO of Timbre Group, also made the list. He runs a chain of popular music bars that supports local musicians.

In the Thinker category, we have Ho Kwon Ping, executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, which runs a number of luxury spa hotels.  He’s done really well, with Forbes listing him in 2010 as the 26th richest man in Singapore. What many don’t know, however, is that he took over his father’s hotel business and turned it into the empire that it is today.

There’s also Cherian George, media academic and former editor at The Straits Times, who started two current affairs publications, mixmagazine.sg and What’s Up under his company News For Kids.

And this might surprise you: the Entertainment category actually features the most entrepreneurs, more than the Business category in fact. How’s that for star-studded?

First up, there’s ‘Singapore Boy’ Hossan Leong, who co-founded Paul Carr Consultancy, a Singapore-based entertainment and media training company.

Next, Irene Ang, popularly known as ‘Rosie Phua’ in hit comedy sitcom Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd, runs her own artiste management company FLY Entertainment (read SGE’s interview with her).

And who can forget the chameleonic comedienne Michelle Chong, most famous for portraying multiple roles in news parody show The Noose. She recently adopted a new role of an entrepreneur when she founded Huat Films.

Finally, there’s Adrian Pang, actor, presenter, and dramatist, who recently left Singapore’s largest broadcaster to start his own drama company PANGDEMONiUM! with his wife.

It looks like the entrepreneurial community will be spoilt for choice here.