1415T1g1 Silicon Vallley/Participant Information/Teams/Team3

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Teng Yu and Luqman

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  Teng Yu and Luqman

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  Teng Yu and Luqman

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  Teng Yu and Luqman

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  Teng Yu and Luqman

Companies We're Contacting

Singtel Innov8

Dropbox

Contact Us

If you have any "lobang" or information that would help us in contacting and negotiating with the companies, please contact us:

Name	Email
Teng Yu	tyzhang.2012@smu.edu.sg
Luqman	luqmanar.2012@smu.edu.sg

About Singtel Innov8

Established in 2011, SingTel Innov8, a wholly subsidiary of the SingTel group, is a corporate venture fund with its own decision making, approval and funding process. Being the leading telecommunication company is Singapore, SingTel Innov8's primary targets are network capabilities, next generation devices, digital content services and enablers to enhance customer experience. They received $200 million Singapore Dollars in funding from both their parent company, SingTel group, and Temasak Holdings Singapore. With SingTel group's operations in 26 countries, SingTel Innov8 is able to have a widespread of influence. This allows them to be in the prime position to attract new ventures in these countries. In 2013, SingTel group announced that they will inject $2 billion into SingTel Innov8 over the next three years as part of its expansion plans. This funds will be mainly used for startup acquisition.

Our Approach

SingTel Innov8 was contacted by our Professor, Dr Benjamin Gan. After we received the duties, we conducted research on the company to find out more about their operations.

Updates

Date	Action
8th December 2014	1500 to 1615.

Locations

71 Ayer Rajah Crescent, #02-22, Singapore 139951

599 Second Street, California

Areas of Focus

• Internet Applications
  • Flocation - Tour Package Website
  • ShopSpot - Ecommerce Website

• New Digital Media
  • POKKT - Alternate Mobile Monetization Platform
  • 2359 - Creating solutions for digital media

• Digital Content
  • VIKI - Video content (sharing and viewing)
  • bubbly - Sharing of voice recordings online

• Enhancers for user experience
  • Kai Square - Consolidation of surveillance data
  • migme - Chatting application

• Network Capabilities

Case Study

JFDI-Innov8 2012 Bootcamp

• 26th Jan 2012
• 60% of 50 entrepreneurs' ideas were accepted
• Each team was awarded $600k

SWOT Analysis

STRENGTHS

• Parent company is the top telecommunication company in Singapore
• Backed by Temasek Holdings
• Strong overseas presence
• Strong local presence

WEAKNESS

• Legal issues in Australia
• Currency trends

OPPORTUNITIES

• Further expansion plans in place
• Other forms of investments
• Created a incubator with NUS for aspiring entrepreneurs

THREAT

• Latest addition in the market: MyRepublic
• StarHub's i3 program

Learning Points

Through this visit, we hope to understand the process of how a company in Singapore manages to establish a base in San Francisco while fighting off strong competitors. At the same time, we would like to understand more about their project selection criteria and what kind of idea will capture their attention.

About Dropbox

Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston in 2007 with the intention of helping people who kept forgetting to bring USB flash drives out. Headquartered in San Francisco, Dropbox provides cloud storages for users. The concept behind it is to allow users to create a folder for any usage, and drag their files into the folder. This folder will be synchronised across all the platforms (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS and web browsers) that the user employs. This allows users to be able to retrieve their files without having to bring the physical drive out. Ever since its interception, Dropbox has grown phenomenally in both revenue and user based. By providing a freemium service, it attracts a strong user base with a initial free 2GB worth in storage. Dropbox is valued highly at the range of $5 to $10 billion dollars and its revenue in 2011 was $240 million.

Our Approach

Dropbox was contacted by our Team 2 and was handled over to us. After we received the duties, we contacted our host to arrange for a meet up session.

Updates

Date	Action
11th December 2014	1030 to 1130

Technology related to SMU's courses

Originally, Dropbox focused on using Python as their main programming language. From 2013 onwards, they shifted to GO as its backend infrastructure and Coffeescript as their browser-side codebase.

Architectural Analysis
The entire concept of Dropbox relies heavily on synchronisation and sharing along personal storage. In order to ensure reliability, Dropbox ensures multi-version control, which allows users to update a file without overwriting versions. This is seen when a copy of the file is created when a user tries to save when the version of the document has changed. Furthermore, it supports revision history, which allows any users in a shared folder to rollback and retrieve an old file if needed. By default, the version history is kept for 30 days and will be refreshed after that.

Dropbox provides a technology called LAN sync, which allows computers in the same lan network to download files from each other instead of having to continuously hitting the central server.

Information Security and Trust
Dropbox uses SSL transfers for synchronisation and stores the data via AES-256 encryption. This is done with Dropbox's own encryption keys and not the users' encryption keys.

SWOT Analysis

STRENGTHS

• Intuitive and easy to use
• Widely used by students in the university
• Free of charge for a good portion
• Strong brand name
• Adoption by schools and businesses
• Was considered to be Y Combinator's most successful investment to date

WEAKNESS

• Relatively smaller free storage space
• Privacy concerns
• Hacking issues
• Bad reputation of cloud storage

OPPORTUNITIES

• Further expansion plans to more businesses
• Moving to underdeveloped countries

THREAT

• SkyDrive (OneDrive)
• Google Drive
• iCloud
• Copy
• CloudMe