1314T2g1 South Korea/Participant Information/Jeremy Zhong Jiahao/DuringTrip
The following section focuses on the reflections and learning points for all the companies that we had visited! Indeed refreshing and I've learnt heaps! Let's go.
After we arrived at the airport, we went straight to visit our first company - TwinWord.
One crucial problem that Twinword identified is that computers can't interpret associative words accurately. For example, if I were to say, "sky, cold, high"… a computer may not be able to interpret that as a cloud. This gap is where TwinWord comes in.
- Data Collection process are all crowdsourced-based - this strategy is really smart as they left the entire data collection process to the users. The users use it for free. In exchange, TwinWord gets your valuable data to further improve its search algorithm with other data mining techniques.
- Identifying a Market Gap - It's very important to identify something that's lacking in the industry. If no one sees that gap, no one is going to invest in yo u (e.g. Smart Content)
- Always create an API - And make it easy for developers out there to invoke them. Through this, you would be able to grow exponentially on your data collection process. More developers = more of their users using = more data
- Support from Higher Management - It's very important to get all the support from them. One of the examples that was drawn are these phones that are readily available for them to test across multiple platforms.
- Unfortunately, that isn't (from what I heard) what IIE offers. Phones are not readily available for students to borrow and test on - which is something they can look at
Interestingly, SmartContent, the incubation for global & small giant smart content companies (e.g. Twinword) spoke to us and gave us a quick rundown on the company. More details can be found here.
- ZERO Equity - Amazing! These government incubators provides full support for all their startups without having an equity in them. This isn't the case in Singapore where the government takes a huge equity in the startups that they are investing in. Such strong support from the government encourages budding entrepreneurs to step up and start innovating!
- Just Innovate - I love how they just kept emphasise the point of "DO IT!". Don't worry even if you fail. Just try again.
Ian and his team are so awesome to make time down for us during labour day to share with us an interesting social music app - listr.fm
Listr.fm's main motto is to make people's life better by allowing people to share their love of music with others, and allow others to discover their own music.
My first reaction to this concept is, "hey! How about Spotify? How is this different?". It seems like Ideaabove focus a lot more on the social aspects of music, getting people to share their playlist, and eventually recommend them musics.
I would love to see their growth in this! "Easily sharing & recommending music to friends"
- Backend Analysis Platform - I love this one. IdeaAbove would be collecting data on how people are sharing musics and recommending musics to one another. With all these data, they would be able to spot interesting patterns and be able to sell to music companies. This is a huge B2B model which I believe would make lots of money! Unfortunately, they didn't have an example to show us yet.
- Have a Well Thought Mitigation Plan - There are some angles which Ian and team weren't able to tackle which I felt is very important. For example, IdeaAbove is heavily dependent on YouTube on their daily operations. What if one day YouTube's API gets completely eradicated? Are there any mitigation plans in place? Right, we can argue that, that is highly unlikely - but it's still possible. We should have a plan, somehow for every single scenario. Ian's pretty grateful that we raised up this point!
- K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple, Silly) - It's the CONCEPT! We were lucky to bump into the CEO of another company - MyRealTrip.com. This startup has an interesting concept of getting local experts to become tour guides to make money! (e.g. if you're an expert in Singapore and would like to tour foreigners around Singapore. All you have to do is match your itinerary with your knowledge. Match? Let's go! - It's that simple but interesting.)
Oh, Ian mentioned that they would like to have some exposure in Singapore. Thankfully, I have some connection with a writer from VulcanPost.com and this would be a great opportunity for them to do so. Will be doing so the moment we land :)
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