I chose to stay away from the crowds on the final day, and instead went for a run with my girlfriend, before packing my bag for our trip to Telunas Beach tomorrow, and settling down for a nice home-cooked dinner with my mum, while catching the captivating TV serial “The Little Nonya”.

2008 had begun well enough, but quickly degenerated into a blood bath. We’re still not out of the woods yet, and probably won’t be well out until sometime in 2010. A better year ahead perhaps?

I don’t typically do New Year resolutions either…but I’ll make an exception this year ;-):

1. I will endeavor to turn my upcoming 2-year stint at the new company into a success - more on that as things get confirmed.
2. I pray that I will learn greater understanding and patience, especially towards my loved ones.
3. I intent to spend more time with myself in 2009 than I had in 2008, which wasn’t much to begin with.
4. I resolve to buy myself a MacBook Pro to replace my 5+, almost 6-year old Powerbook, hopefully by Q1 2009.
5. I resolve to get back into Photography in 2009 with my new rangefinder-ish black Panasonic Lumix LX-3 after I’d sold off my 20D + 17-40L + 24-70L + 70-200L IS towards the end of 2006.
6. I promise to remain true to myself and begin every single day with a smile on my face.

What’s your New Year resolution(s)?

1.   Professor Wong, my online research revealed little about KRDL and its past. Could you tell us a bit about KRDL as you saw it?

Certainly. As you may already know, Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL) was formed from the merger on 1 Apr ‘98 between former national IT institutes - the Information Technology Institute (ITI) and the Institute of System Science (ISS).

While this new entity was all about doing research in a different way, we were also very much guinea pigs. KRDL’s management had to pioneer many of its own operating rules, such as the spin-out process, and how to reward people fairly for their inventions. We had between 400 to 500 scientists and engineers at its peak, and until its existence officially came to an end in Jan ‘01, KRDL saw a total of 20 spin-off companies pass through its doors.

Of course, with its spin-out successes, KRDL was losing people faster than we could retrain and replace them - entire teams were known to leave with the spun-out startup. The staff population dropped to a low of 300-plus towards Jan ‘01. This was an example of the unintended side effects of the ‘1st-generation’ rules.

2.   What happened to KRDL after Jan ‘01?

KRDL went into sort of a limbo for a year after that. I was a researcher at the Biomedical Lab at KRDL then, and saw KRDL merge with the NTU Centre for Signal Processing (CSP) to form the Laboratories for Information Technology (LIT) in Jan ‘02. In that process, the rules that we operated under went the complete opposite in an attempt to correct things that broke under KRDL - perhaps too much so.

For instance, KRDL management were allowed to personally hold shares in companies that were spun-out as a form of incentive to encourage successful spin-outs. This is one policy that was subsequently revised under A*STAR and Exploit Technologies, which had by then absorbed all the research institutes in Singapore under it, including LIT. Lessons were quickly learnt, and mistakes swiftly undone. On Nov ‘02, LIT was merged with another research institute under A*STAR, the Institute for Communications Research (ICR) to form the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R). By then, the rules and policies were revised to an acceptable middle ground.

3.   What sort of ‘acceptable middle ground’ changes were they? Tell us more.

For one, A*STAR now got shares in the spin-out startups. In exchange, the inventor was incentivized through performance bonuses (cash).

4.   Wasn’t that less ideal for inventors? Some of these inventions did turn out into pretty good companies didn’t they?

Well, yes and no. One example of this is Molecular Connections, which has 250 engineers in India today. I was one of the 2 researchers whose technologies were commercialized, and received a generous cash performance bonus in lieu of shares. I am happy to see Molecular Connections continue to do well till today, and have the opportunity to continue serving as their scientific adviser.

Muvee and Buzzcity were the 2 other notable spin-outs that continue to do well today. In both cases, the researchers chose to quit A*STAR to join the startup. I am happy to see the both of them do well.

5.   Tell me what you thought was the good, bad and ugly of KRDL.

I liked the diversity in research approach by people - spanning fundamental (which took a long time) through to applied research (the sort of tech that was very easily replaced). There were all sorts of research labs within KRDL, good/bad management with good/bad technology.

Most importantly, KRDL signaled a change (for the first time in Singapore) in the way research is done. The environment within KRDL was also very nice - even with commercial targets, it permitted long-term research to be done, some of which has borne fruits for Singapore. For instance, the brain-imaging work done during KRDL contributed significantly to A*STAR’s Biomedical Imaging department’s current-day prestige.

I was fortunate in the sense that I did not have any bad experiences while at KRDL. Our manager had freedom in deciding how to run our Biomedical Lab. I couldn’t say the same for other labs though - not all managers were equally capable.

6.   Towards the twilight months of KRDL, the world was experiencing the dot-com bust. How did that affect your work?

Not at all! We were largely insulated from it. The work that we did at the A*STAR Singapore Bioimaging Consortium were much longer term - we were lucky in that sense.

7.   Describe the spin-out process.

The director of each research lab was responsible for introducing researchers to the right people. There was also one business manager per lab to drive this effort, although the actual working model might vary, depending on the individual style of the director/manager and the progress of the research. In general though, investors and entrepreneurs were invited to visit KRDL and see the technologies, to decide areas in which to invest and form companies. External inputs were also sought with regards to R&D directions, in order to produce commercializable innovations.

8.   Tell us one difference between KRDL then, and A*STAR today.

At KRDL, buyers of any nationality could license the technologies and spin it out at the right price. At A*STAR, Singaporeans are given priority in accessing the technologies, ahead of everyone else. However, it can be difficult to determine if sufficient time has been granted to Singaporeans to step forward to commercialize the technologies, inadvertently slowing down the process of spinning out companies.

9.   I saw Professor Juzar Motiwalla’s name on a door as I walked down the aisle to your office. He was CEO of KRDL wasn’t he? Do you guys meet up and catch up for old times’ sake?

Yes! A KRDL alumni exists, and we occasionally hold informal gatherings. On average, 30 to 50 KRDL alums show up at each gathering.

Thank you for your time and effort in sharing your experiences with us.

(extracted from Professor Wong’s website)
Lim Soon WONG is a professor in the School of Computing and the School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. Before that, he was the Deputy Executive Director for Research at A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research. He is currently working mostly on knowledge discovery technologies and is especially interested in their application to biomedicine. Prior to that, he has done significant research in database query language theory and finite model theory, as well as significant development work in broad-scale data integration systems. Limsoon has written about 100 research papers, a few of which are among the best cited of their respective fields. In recognition for his contributions to these fields, he has received several awards, the most recent being the 2003 FEER Asian Innovation Gold Award for his work on treatment optimization of childhood leukemias. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ICP), Bioinformatics (OUP), and Drug Discovery Today (Elsevier). He is a scientific advisor to Semantic Discovery Systems (UK), Molecular Connections (India), CellSafe International (Malaysia), and KooPrime (Singapore). He received his BSc(Eng) in 1988 from Imperial College London and his PhD in 1994 from University of Pennsylvania.

This trip has been a fruitful one - we began the week with a series of meetings with VCs along Sand Hill Road to bounce ideas with them on how Singapore could play a small (but hopefully useful) role in keeping the cogs of the Silicon Valley innovation engine oiled and turning, even as the financial storms continue to blow. Geez’, how did Madoff get away with that US$50b Ponzi scheme of his over at Wall Street? Someone must have been sleeping on his watch! Not that US$50b is a large sum considering the trillions that have been poured into this debacle since the circus show began months ago. But I digress.

Thursday and Friday was spent catching up with some startups in the Bay Area, to explore ways in which they could leverage upon Singapore to extend their runway and establish an engineering center in Singapore that is 7-hours away from half the world’s population. In case you’re wondering how, the government of Singapore has cash grants that can support development work by footing up to 50% of the salaries of their Singapore-based employees. You don’t have to hire locals to extend your runway. Even seeding the team with engineers from your HQ (on USA pay) would result in anywhere between 30% - 50% runway extension (conservative estimate of variation due to inefficiencies in the relocation process). The best part? These grants are non-dilutive and do not require any stake of your profits or IP. It’s also perfect that Singapore does not have capital gains tax, nor have immigration quotas for H1-B-equivalents or Green Card equivalents. Drop me a line if you’d like to find out more.

My belief is that the next 12  - 18 months will be absolutely critical to startups everywhere. The year of 2009 is definitely one of negative growth in most markets, save China, India and a few others. I’ve been following the market closely over the past few months, and my largest concern is that the consumer credit card market will explode. Amex’s conversion to bank status wasn’t enough to stem erosion in confidence. Americans, and other plastic-trigger-happy folks around the world are known to have the toxic habit of rolling over their balance month on month. Woe be us should this go up in flames as well.

There’s plenty of follow-ups I gotta get out of my way, and hey, I have a flight to catch, so till next time!

Source: Thomson Financial, VentureSource

I had alluded to the opportunity for the Singapore Government to turn crisis into opportunity and capitalize on the downturn to stimulate the entrepreneurial landscape in Singapore in an earlier post. One such window for our government to act would be during the upcoming Budget announcement scheduled for sometime in Feb 2009, a mere 4 months away.

A peek into an extract from a recent Parliamentary report dated 20 Oct 2008 revealed the possibility of pump-priming as a measure that the government will undertake to boost the economy towards recovery. Although Minister Lim Hng Kiang was non-committal, my intuition tells me we’ll be seeing a 2009 Budget laced with some ‘emergency response package’.

A slowdown is beyond doubt. What remains to be seen is how bad the fallout will be. Although Singapore has lived up to its social democracy label many a times with its direct and indirect subsidies in hard times, we can most certainly count on our Government to be prudent with its finances and toe the line in putting out a package that will appear highly impactful, while limiting the absolute dollars actually spent. Just like you would do when you’re new at your job, impression management is key to the success of next year’s Budget. Give the majority of our people and businesses the impression that plenty of help is available (and applicable to them), while channeling the majority of public funds to areas that need them the most and can have direct impact on our national bottom line.

As much as entrepreneurship has a small and indirect role to play in our nation’s economy progress, I do hope our Civil Service recognizes its potential long-term multiplier effect, and carve something out for these brave men and women.

Some wild ideas as food for thought from me to get the ball rollin’:

• Qualified VCs who fund start-ups anywhere in the world are given an in-principle approval for a grant supporting up to 50% of the base salary of its Singapore engineering/development staff for a period of 2 years
• Innovation tax ‘credits’ to encourage larger companies to buy products and solutions from start-ups (similar to The Enterprise Challenge, but for private-sector consumption)
• Form a band-of-CEOs comprising of experienced start-up executives who have experience managing start-ups in downturns, to be placed into promising Singapore-based start-ups to help them weather through the storm
• Put together a sizeable fund to take positions into promising growth-stage infocomm enterprises to capitalize on M&A opportunities with attractive prices, to be in a better position to grow once the global economy recovers

Any more to add to the wishlist?

I first heard about CrunchyRoll from an old friend of mine a year ago. I got tired of figuring out which stack of multi-gigabyte Naruto torrents I had to download to continue watching where I last left off, and was poking around for a better solution. The ‘CrunchyRoll’ name popped up several times - heck, my younger-by-4-years sister had been watching tonnes of stuff via CrunchyRoll months ahead of me. I found the interface too comic-ky (the font type was a tad childish) for me at first, although truth be had, work and life was taking its toll on me, and I couldn’t find the time to myself to poke around CrunchyRoll much.

Interestingly, Kun revealed that Singapore users represented a significant portion of their monthly traffic. To make sure, I popped by Alexa. Lo-and-behold, Singapore users represented 6.9% of CrunchyRoll’s traffic, behind USA and China. CrunchyRoll was also Singapore’s 20th most visited site, beating Singapore Pools (at 26th, more tech-savvy anime viewers than gamblers eh?), Flickr (30th) and SPH’s much-touted Stomp.com.sg (74th).

Then again, CrunchyRoll’s popularity shouldn’t come as such a surprise - Singaporeans are known to want things cheap (in this case, free!) and good. Furthermore, Singaporean youths seem to prefer indulging themselves in Japanese culture/lore - anime, manga, cosplay, Hello Kitty, etc. A quick trip to the Toy and Comic Convention earlier this year in June, and the upcoming Anime Festival Asia 2008 on 22 - 23 November shows heavy Japanese anime/manga/cosplay influences. There was a Natsu Matsuri held at the Singapore Japanese School in August this year. Earlier today, I was at Wisma Atria today, and saw a bunch of local teenagers dressed up in skimpy Japanese schoolwear stream by.

Of course, for obvious reasons, I can’t reveal commercially sensitive information regarding my discussion with CrunchyRoll. Suffice to say that the backlash received from irate users and others borne by the CR team in their quest to turn legit and mainstream will not be for nought in the end. Traditional content owners back in Japan are rapidly realizing how little time youths spend in front of the television, and are scrambling to find alternative platforms that will allow them to get their content and brands out, while retaining control. It is probably also safe to assume that they are also generally clueless about the increasingly social web. All of the above are voids that someone like CrunchyRoll can fill, as they (hopefully) laugh their way to the bank, hand in hand with Venrock.

I was trying to log in to my CrunchyRoll account earlier, but forgot my user name. The reminder email brought a smile to my face.

hihi,

your username for crunchyroll is “xxxx”.  stop forgetting your username, it makes me sad

gg,
shinji ^_^

Cheers to you and your team, Kun, and a belated Happy Halloween’s!

These past 2 years, I have been fortunate enough to be (in my opinion) well-exposed to the Singapore technology entrepreneurial scene - enough to have a decent sense of the current state of affairs. I have also been privy to anecdotal comments from veterans about the ‘hey-days of Singapore IT’ and the significant role that KRDL played at that time. Now, I’m not the sort to kiss and tell, so you won’t be getting anything out of me, unless I manage to convince some of them to share with us their experiences (via interviews perhaps) in the future.

A quick side trip to www.krdl.org.sg yielded a dead end. Digging harder turned up an old presentation on KRDL at Professor Wong Lim Soon’s NUS School of Computing website, which I have reposted to SlideShare for posterity. He also has a flickr set of (presumably) his time with KRDL then. See below for the slides to give you an overview of what KRDL was all about.

From the above set of slides, I note the following KDRL spin-offs; SingaLab, Logipolis (terminated), PixAround, Private Express (struck off), WholeTree.com (in liquidation), geneticXchange (BusinessWeek lists them, but the company seems defunct today), ThirdVoice, BuzzCity, CommonTown, Transparity (ACRA shows it as dissolved, but the URL sends me to SecureAge - reboot?), Horizon.iExpress, Mustard Technology, NewsTakes (dissolved), Volume Interactions, smartBridges, Nanostorage (dissolved). 

More to come on the stories behind the scenes - if I can only find time to conduct my research to piece history back together.

Singaporean and other Asian habitues of Second Life can look forward to a more ‘hyper’ experience in the popular 3-D social world.

Their avatars - or virtual alter egos - will be able to chat, make a date and shake hands on a business deal faster than before.

This is because Second Life’s California-based creator Linden Lab will, for the first time, locate servers here within the next six months.

Images and search requests will load faster as users will no longer need to tap into its United States-based servers.

There’s more: Over the next three years, Linden Lab expects to invest between US$5 million (S$7.5 million) and US$10 million in new staff and training here as it expands.

The firm, whose software is used by Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Cisco Systems to host virtual conferences, already has an office in Singapore - its only one in Asia. Located at the Fusionopolis research and development complex at the One-North business park, Linden Lab officially opens on Tuesday. It started operations in April this year.

The set-up is manned by nine software developers, engineers and project managers. The number is set to double to 20 by next year with most of the new hires from Singapore.

Their mission: to provide round-the-clock software development and quality checks that have, until now, been based mainly in the US.

‘When the sun goes down in the US, the Singapore office fires up to test the software codes,’ said Mr Joe Miller, vice-president of platform and technology development at Linden Lab.

‘By handing over jobs to another time zone, we can roll out new features more than twice as fast as before.’

Every two weeks, it releases up to 40 new features and improvements. One key feature rolled out three months ago is the ability to sync an avatar’s lip movements with audio. Such frequent updates are aimed at making Second Life more user-friendly.

Today, the 3-D virtual world has six million active avatars, of which 50,000 belong to users residing in Singapore. At any time, about 70,000 avatars are logged in. They engage in activities from attending concerts and dating to buying and selling virtual goods with Linden dollars. Although a virtual currency, it has a real-life exchange rate to the US dollar, based on supply and demand like any other currency.

Eighty per cent of the firm’s revenue comes from selling virtual land to companies - including big names like Reuters and IBM - and individuals. The rest comes from a cut it takes from transactions in the 3-D world. Mr Miller says about US$2 million worth of virtual goods change hands daily in Second Life, and that the firm has been profitable for the past 18 months.

He said Linden Lab was drawn to Singapore by the tax incentives the Economic Development Board offers, and the English-speaking culture: ‘The support we got from EDB is unparalleled.’

This is highly unusual, given that EDB tends to go after large foreign direct investment (FDI) targets, i.e. MNCs such as REC, Bosch and GlaxoSmithKline. My sense is this investment promotion project was highly strategic in nature, rather than based on employment numbers and investment amounts by the company. Linden Labs.

I just got off the phone with someone from SingTel, and learnt about an upcoming briefing on iChallenge 08, its latest initiative under the SingTel Partner Programme (SPP) to drive innovative and insightful Infocomm Technology (ICT) solutions. More on this over at their eDM.

Under the inaugural event, there will be 4 categories modeled along verticals, specifically:

1. Healthcare - mobile patient health record
2. Logistics - remote vehicle diagnostics
3. Workplace Innovation
4. Consumer Mobile Application

From its choice of categories, it appears SingTel has tailored this iChallenge competition both with specific business needs (points 1 and 2), and generic ones (3 and 4). Content, for obvious reasons, has been left out of this hybrid event, very much a cross between the RFIs and Y-Combinator approach. The winner of each category will receive a cash prize of S$20,000 (approx. US$13,245 at today’s forex rates), and an opportunity to commercialize the solution with SingTel.

Now, all that’s missing is the jazz of participation by our local early-stage VCs. A large marquee corporate client, equity investments…what downturn? *wink* What’s interesting for me will be the ratio of local to foreign entrepreneurs participating in this, and how they evaluate the winners. More on that after I attend the briefing session.

Corporate sponsors include BlackBerry, Forum Nokia, HTC, Nokia Siemens Networks, as well as IDA and SiTF.

The briefing will be held on 31 October 2008 from 2pm to 5pm, at the SingTel Business Solutions Centre. For you interested parties, RSVP over here.

The gahmen (poorly pronounced Singlish, read as government) will collect 10 times what they need (fines, fees, taxes), and spend 1 time that to build (infrastructure). PAP = Pay And Pay.

Such sentiments are inevitable as the government shifts from indirect to direct taxation. The recent relaxation of our Constitution to allow the use of capital gains to fund public expenditures is a good move, but my gut tells me another GST (goods and service tax) increase (maybe 1%?) is in the offing once the economy recovers from this USA-induced financial mess.

I’ve been driving for 30 years…it’s much harder to make money as a taxi driver nowadays…I’m old, have to take it slower, sometimes don’t earn enough to even cover rent, also like that. Can’t be helped, at least I have something to do.

Hmm, he obviously hasn’t heard of NTUC and opportunities for retraining. But then again, most old dogs don’t want to learn new tricks. They’d rather sit around void decks and coffee stalls and commiserate and gossip about the latest happenings around the estate, and direct their negative energies and emotions and hurl accusations at the boogeyman of the middle-class, a.k.a the Singapore government.

I paid $17+ from the city to Yishun and $22+ on the journey back, for a combined total of $40. A trip home from the office for me would cost me $20 because of peak-hour traffic snarls even though my home is a mere 10km away. I’ve always believed the business model of our taxi operators (revenue via rental of cars) does not incentivize them to optimize taxi-to-passenger matching and translate into taxis as a viable and affordable form of public transport. 

You young people have it a lot harder these days…my 4-room HDB flat (public apartment) house was only S$20,000.

As of last night, 1 US dollar equals 1.50 Singapore dollar.

My parents’ 3-room HDB flat in Clementi 25, 30 years ago cost them $15,000. They subsequently upgraded to a 5-room flat when I was 10 years old to the tune of S$90,000. Today, a new 5-room in a good location (transport-wise) can be priced anywhere between S$400,000 to S$600,000. If you’re willing to settle for less in terms of location (on the fringes of Singapore, i.e. Punggol, Yishun, Jurong West) and travel for 1 hour and beyond to work each day, the figure drops to anywhere between S$250,000 to S$350,000 for 100 sqm. Sounds great for the older generation (asset appreciation), sucky for us younger generation indeed!

Drivers these days drive poorly. Don’t know how they teach them driving at the driving schools one.

I had to agree with him on this one - I chose to learn to drive when I was studying in USA because I did not want to be subjected  have to go through to Singapore’s minimum-25-classes requirement and high cost, and got my driving license with flying colours in Pittsburgh after 8 hours of lessons in 2003. 5 years and 20,000 miles later, I am accident-free and ticket-free *crosses fingers*. The system needs to impart confidence, and not just the rules and mechanics of driving.

What to do, I don’t have many more years to go. Just take it one day at a time la.

He has given up fighting the river of life, just like many other Singaporeans. Don’t you join him and become a mere statistic!

Some of the above views left me concerned about where we are heading towards as a country in the name of progress. I know I might be leaning too much on the Law of Small Numbers here by going with just the view of 1 taxi driver, but somehow my gut tells me these views are also shared by the majority of Singapore’s middle-class. The income gap has been increasing, and will only be felt more sorely by the middle class amidst the slowdown - the lower-class will receive their dole-outs and get by, while the upper class continues to live in private housing, move around in fancy cars and travel around the world.

Superb and visionary social engineering has gotten us this far, and will probably get us over that next mountain top. Although some of us will fall wayside on that ardous journey, in the larger scheme of things, they won’t matter very much as long as they continue to check the right box when it is election time. After all, we’re going to grow from 4.8 million to 6.5 million population over the next 40 - 50 years aren’t we? Young adults like us are busily engaged in the rat race to earn a living and get on with the expensive life that is Singapore - unless the numbers and lifestyle make sense, we most certainly won’t be having kids anytime soon. That 6.5 million magical figure can only be achieved by welcoming talent that is better than the average Singaporean - no sense racing to the bottom.

The economically displaced, disgrunted, esoteric and politically opposed can well leave this Little Red Dot. For the rest of us, it’s back to our life in sunny Singapore, where summer reigns all year round.

How’s that as a tagline for Singapore Tourism Board’s overseas campaigns? *wink*