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An old friend asked recently: “I have an idea. Can we chat? I want to know: is it original? is it viable?” After reviewing almost a thousand applications, the JFDI admissions committee has become hypersensitive to signs of domain expertise. Every batch there are certain popular ideas that multiple teams apply with. Each of those…

Collabspot, the sales email platform that integrates CRM with Gmail, today announced that it had secured S$80,000 seed funding from an international syndicate of investors including Louis Naugès (France), Kevin Dewalt (US/China) and 8 Capita (Singapore), writes Hugh Mason. The move to build international connections reflects two further disclosures by Collabspot: that two thirds of…

Lim Kuo-Yi spoke with our founders about consultative selling today. In an early stage startup environment, what the founders needed to find, was the fit between their products and their customers’ visions. Having won major contracts and signed on IBM as an system integrator for a USD $15mn governmental project, Kuo-Yi broke down his approach…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC4HLEvAkfI As JFDI.Asia’s 2013B batch of start-ups emerge into the glare of public attention, they’re asking … how do I pull the spotlight in my direction? Anyone watching Singapore’s startup scene over the last few weeks can’t have failed to notice the impact that Y-combinator graduates Striking.ly have made in just a few weeks ……

When you launch anything new, at first people don’t know about it. They don’t care about it either. Three things can change all that and get you noticed, writes JFDI.Asia CEO Hugh Mason. 1. Know Your Audience You’re taking people on a mental journey from where they are now to where you want them to…

Common sense Smitty is both technical and goal driven. He’s an all-star products person. At today’s mentoring session, he kicked off with a talk to helped JFDI teams focus on two things: 1) create an emotional connection with customers, and 2) make hard decisions early on. Be funny Most startups were battling the online noise…

  Know your customers Scott Bales stopped by JFDI to talk to the teams about Persona Development. His talk was by far one of the best I had seen on this topic—simple and loaded with anecdotal war stories. It was great to hear him explain persona to the founders. Persona Development made sense, and sometimes…

So Samsung launched a smartwatch today. But click on this picture. Look closely and there’s something wrong. Can you see it? I am not a watch wearer, let alone a watch-buyer, but one thing leaps out to me from this image which heads a techcrunch article today. The screw heads aren’t lined up. This is…

Razmig Hovaghimian, Changseong Ho and Jiwon Moon founded Viki.com in 2007 while they were students. Following a few years on the back-burner while the trio finished their studies, the website offering on-demand streaming video from around the world came out of beta in 2010. Yesterday, Viki.com was valued north of USD200m in a sale to…

The Singapore blogosphere is all atwitter: Viki just got bought for $200MM! That’s the biggest news in Singapore startups in two decades. Not since Creative’s Soundblaster in the 1990s has a Singapore tech company succeeded on such a spectacular scale. Congratulations to Razmig, of course, but what does it mean for the rest of us…