Jerene WONG Pei Ling Trip
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Day 1
All of us have been planning, preparing and really excited for this technopreneurship study mission. The start-up companies in South Korea and Tokyo have a lot to offer and we are looking forward to this enriching learning experience. After touching down at Incheon Airport, we made our way to our first destination, Twinword, located at G Square.
Twinword This company has been around for around two years, founded by Kono. Kim. Basically, their business approach is to analyse big data collected and understand human computer interaction. The objective is to understand how people associate various words. For instance, key words such as student, chairs, board, people will associate to the theme school. The interesting thing is how they come up with such an algorithm to rank the various key words and associate it to things people tend to relate to.
Smart Content Center This organisation is set up to support smart content-related companies of Korea with high potentials to become global entrepreneurs, funded by the government. In Korea, the government is very supportive of start-up companies. In comparison to the start-up scene in Singapore, in my opinion, there are a lot of restrictions and certain schemes would expect a certain percentage of equity which might discourage people to go ahead to go for it. Unlike in Korea, this Smart Content Center has an incubation program to provide free space and 50% of all the utility cost for a maximum duration of 2 years. In other words, it lightens the burden of start-up firms and help to collaborate with other related institution in the market.
Lasso With the increasing trend in mobile market in Korea, the founder identified a gap from the browse product online to buy products offline stage. They simply produce web service to bridge the gap identified. I see a lot of potential in this market. Indeed, there is an increasing trend in mobile market and the e-commerce scene. As technology becomes more advanced, people have abandoned traditional way of doing things such as visiting a brick and mortar store to ask a sales person about a product.
As Twinword and Lasso are part of Smart Content Center, they are all located in the same building. Hence, they brought us around for an office tour. We got to see the 3D machines and understand how the models were made, which I find it pretty interesting. Knowing that 3D printing is one of the latest trends forecasted by Garter and did research on it a few months back, I finally get to see how it is being made and understand about it better. Visiting such start-up companies let me see a different perspective of companies in the aspects of company culture. We can say that it is very open to encourage people to give wild ideas openly.
KBS Our team is very privileged to have the opportunity to visit the various studios in KBS and understand certain standard protocols of doing things. I find it really amazing and tedious for the staff to prepare for a television broadcast. It is so much tougher as what we expected it to be.
Overall, the first day of our study mission has been amazing. I am looking forward to day 2 and beyond to explore on the start-up scenes in the respective two countries.
Day 2
On our second day, which is also Labour day, we visited one company hosted by Freda and Si Hui. Previously, we met the CEO and two interns in Singapore on briefing day, which gave us an overview of the service they provided.
Ideabove Inc.
After our company visit, we went to Sicheon for shopping and tour around the area. We head over to Ewha Women's University. The landscape really caught my attention. After an afternoon of shopping, we went to watch the Jump show. One word to describe the show-Awesome as it is hilarious and very entertaining. It is very different from the usual play I watched in Singapore.
