“Kopi” with Ruiwen Chua of Hackerspace and SquareCrumbs

Today I have the privilege of featuring Ruiwen Chua, one of the co-founders of local coworking space, HackerspaceSG and Alumni linuxNUS (now renamed NUS Hackers) on SGE. I’ve known Ruiwen for quite some time now and while we didn’t have “kopi” (coffee) for this interview, I did get him to share with us about his mobile app building experience, Kopi (find out more about this uniquely Singapore app below). He also speaks about his new mobile collaborative web app, SquareCrumbs and why he does the things he does.

You spent some time in Stockholm as part of the NOC (National University of Singapore Overseas College) programme. Can you talk about your experiences in Stockholm and compare the startup/entrepreneurial environment there and Singapore?

I went to Stockholm in Jul ’06.

So yeah, the thing that really struck me about the startup scene in Stockholm at that point in time was how almost everyone knew everyone, and how almost every event/party was like a gathering of friends. There was this whole vibe about the community there, and you could just feel that something great would come out that.

(Fun fact: a number of the companies/speakers who spoke at the conference we organised there are doing/have done pretty well — Jaiku (bought by Google), Polar Rose (bought by Apple), Spotify (biggest news in music streaming), Sound Cloud (YouTube for indie DJs. The founders spoke, though not about SC per se), Johan Stael von Holstein (of MyCube, now based in Singapore))

Of course, comparing that to Singapore’s startup scene back then, I did think, admittedly, that our local environment was nowhere as close. Then again, that was almost 5 years ago, so things have improved more than a little bit since then. Singapore’s startup scene has definitely grown a lot tighter, and we’re definitely a lot more similar to the close knit community that we saw back in Stockholm. We’ve got a lot of different activities going on now, conferences like Echelon, Accelerate, Red Dot Ruby Conf and PyCon, unconferences like BarCamp, GeekCamp, EduCamp, MusicCamp and FilmCamp, meetups from the various technical groups and so on, and we’re beginning to recognise the thought leaders and movers and shakers of the community, so we’re definitely on our way to evolving our own unique identity on our little island.

I love that you co-founded HackerspaceSG. It’s a great thing for the startup community and I always recommend and bring friends visiting there. What prompted you to set up HackerspaceSG and how did you get involved?

Getting back from NOC in Stockholm, I was very impressed with the startup/hacker community they had there. Everyone was so close and so connected, and the atmosphere was wonderfully cohesive. Coming back to Singapore, it didn’t look like we had anything close. I wanted to gather the geek/hacker community at first, so the initial idea was for a “geek cafe”, where developers could come and hack away on their pet projects.

I gathered a few friends, and bounced the idea off a few people in the community and found that most were pretty receptive, even enthusiastic about the idea. Then through Jason Ong, we linked up with Meng Wong, who at the time also had plans to start a hackerspace. And the rest is history. The community was receptive and ready to fund the idea, and we felt that the community really needed some place like this, so we dove right in.

Getting involved with the Hackerspace has been a tremendous journey to date, and I’m truly glad that others have found at least some value in it as well. We didn’t really know how we’d manage to fund the place when we first started, but I have to say that the community has been more than supportive over the year-and-a-half or so that we’ve been around, so it’s really thanks to everyone’s contributions and involvement that we still have a hackerspace to call our own.

What are you working on these days, apart from HackerspaceSG?

One of the projects I’m currently working on is SquareCrumbs, a mobile collaborative learning applications.