The Second State of Our Blog

Our blog, SG Entrepreneurs, have just turned 2 years old after 9 July 2005. First and above all, we thank our readers, our friends, our partners (NUS Overseas Colleges, Entrepreneur27, The Digital Movement and Start-Up@Singapore), our resident contributors and many others for their support and help over the years. Without them, we do not think that we have managed to go that far. In this second state of our blog, we want to talk about some of the highlights which have happened in the past year.

We made a couple of milestones in the 2nd year which we believe that are important to our growth and set the path for our future.

• Official Acknowledgements from Respected Institutions and Publications: We have come far now to have several official institutions placing a link from their website to ours, for e.g., Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE) and NUS Overseas College. We hope that in the coming years, we can establish a connection with student entrepreneurial initiatives in the other mainstream institutions for Singapore. We have a recent mention in the Marketing Magazine and also Business Times in Singapore. We hope to continue and improve ourselves to be the premier entrepreneurship blog in Singapore.
• Helping out other entrepreneurial initiatives: We do our best to work with Entrepreneur27, the Digital Movement and Gananan Forum who have contributed significantly to the Interactive-Digital Media and Web 2.0 space in Singapore. With events like E27 IV, Nexus 2007 and BlogOut 2007, we are happy to part of the action and will continue to work with different initiatives in this sector.
• A few famous guests stopped by SG Entrepreneurs: This year is particularly fruitful in terms of getting famous people to be interviewed in SG Entrepreneurs. We are grateful to Chris Anderson (Author of the Long Tail), Tim Draper (Venture Capitalist, Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Cory Ondrejka (CTO, Second Life) Lynda Brown (President of NewMediaBC), Jeremiah Owyang (Web-Strategist.com), Rafi Mohammed (Author, The Art of Pricing) James Seng (Partner, Thymos Capital). We also do not forget our local heroes: Tan Kin Lian (ex-CEO, NTUC Income and SG first corporate blogger), Choon Keat (SharedCopy), Herryanto Siatono (BookJetty), Chua U-Zyn (Ping.SG), Cheo Ming Shen (CEO, Nuffnang), Sivam Krish (CEO, Genometri), Jesse Ting (founder, IConnectE), Leonard Lin (Tyler Projects), Ben Koe and Melvin Yuan (PR Specialists), Preetam Rai (Asia Web 2.0 Guru) and the Exoro Team (Alvin Sim) who have also been featured on our site. Even one of our co-founders Weichang has succeeded in his own right with an entire ST feature article on him.

Our team wish to clarify on one outstanding issue for the year. With regards to the MDA initiative, we note that SGE did not succeed to become one of the designated incubators. However, the co-founders (BL and Gwen) have moved on to join forces with Thymos Capital LLP, while Weichang is still out there creating new ventures on his own.

It is important to note this distinction because SGE will continue to support any entrepreneurial initiatives set up by anyone in the local context and position itself as the neutral ground to talk about the new emerging start-ups in the technology sector and also broadcast events which are of interest to local entrepreneurs.

Here are some things which we hope to do in the coming year:

• More Press Releases for Innovative Start-ups: If you are a new technology start-up who want to tell the world with regards to what you do, we are happy to do a press release for you here in SG Entrepreneurs. We have successfully done that with TenCube and Velvet Puffin this year. As everyone in SG Entrepreneurs are volunteers, if there are any SG start-ups who have made it out there, drop us a note and let us also put up that message for them as well.
• More Writers and a new design: This has been an outstanding issue for the team in general, and we hope to get more writers to join us (and of course, we do pay our resident contributors for those who don’t know). We like to focus a lot more on the content of the site and subsequently become the best entrepreneurship blog in Asia. Another thing is the design of our site. We hope to raise some funds and hire a good designer to provide a better design (i.e. our fourth edition) for the future. Since our forum did not work as well, we have decided to rethink our strategies on that part.
• Our Community: This is something which we have not really done much as a whole, given that entrepreneurs are mainly very busy people. We hope to bring back our pub crawl, and perhaps, also hold a small party sometime in the future (maybe when we reach the 3rd year) to gather different people. Sponsors are, of course, welcome. Most of the time, we usually hang out at the parties of our partners.

We thank everyone for their support and we strive forward into our third year.

May we succeed in our future endeavours from here on.

yours sincerely,
BL
On behalf of the founders of SG Entrepreneurs