Our 7-year itch

7.4 years.

That’s how long SGE has been covering the Singapore and Southeast Asia startup and entrepreneurship scene. Check out how ugly one of the first few versions of our site was back in 2005:

Yes, when we first started those 7ish years ago, we were known as “Singapore Entrepreneurs” which gave us the “SG” in “SGE”. The blog was hosted on Blogger, displayed using one of those free templates (as can be seen above) and focused exclusively on the Singapore entrepreneurship scene, where all three co-founders were based.

How the blog started was a result of us seeing that traditional media wasn’t covering startups and having us all with some experience as entrepreneurs – Bernard with his biotech startup in the UK, Weichang with his tuition and retail companies and myself with a language translation business – we felt strongly that it is when entrepreneurs are starting out that they most need (online) publicity to be visible to potential customers and investors.

6 years on, we brought in our first full-time team member, Terence fresh out of university as Assistant Editor, and we have seen huge growth since then. Isaac and I even had the privilege of hosting the current Singapore President Dr Tony Tan (then Presidential candidate) in an invite-only dialogue session.

Today, SGE covers Southeast Asia and Asia-Pacific at large and looks at all things technology startup-related. To reflect this change definitively and well, to have a shorter domain name and Twitter handle, we are now SGE.io.

You can access all our content via http://SGE.io or http://SGEntrepreneurs.com, so don’t worry, nothing will change from your side. (Unfortunately, we can’t change our Facebook page as we have long busted the threshold of “likes” required, but we are thankful for all 17K++ of you.)

We look forward to your support as we continue covering the Asian tech startup scene and we hope that you like the less-of-a-mouthful, SGE.io.

Here’s to the next 7.4 years.