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I just got two emails asking about JFDI’s ‘success rate’ with startups. They set me thinking about the patterns of success and failure we’ve seen looking at well over 2,000 startup teams in the last few years and why we can now pass on 96% of the applications to JFDI Accelerate with confidence, writes JFDI…

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…

Hidayah Salamat is Associate Editor at I-S magazine in Singapore. She recently interviewed me for a feature on the island’s start-up scene but space limited the material she could publish in print. Here’s the full interview, writes Hugh Mason. Q: “Startup” has become quite a buzzword here. How would you define it? A: We see businesses…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxCUctqBDs Ariff Munshi, co-founder, UserScout— JFDI.Asia is definitely one of the top accelerator programs in this region. Never before have I seen so many entrepreneurs, mentors and investors come through one place over such a short period. Aravind Ravi Sulekha, co-founder, Scrollback— We had a minimum viable product ready. But what we needed the most…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDm91ovaEJc One of the strongest applicants to JFDI.Asia’s bootcamp that couldn’t join us this time around was Tate & Tonic (http://tatetonic.com), so when Singapore’s best-dressed serial entrepreneur and JFDI mentor John Tan walked in to Open House on Friday with a Tate & Tonic box, we couldn’t resist opening it. In Singapore’s fast-evolving e-commerce marketplace,…

I found myself driving the future this morning. Not today’s future, but the future I had imagined when I was a teenager. The passion that made me want to become an engineer came flooding back and I felt lifted up by the excitement of what a group of 100 or so startups around me are…

Crowsourcing Week is a blog that aims to leverage the power of crowdsourcing, with the laudable goal to “bring thought leaders from the space across all industries to share best practices in their respective fields”. So it was an honour to be asked to do my first crowdchat on twitter this evening, with the theme…

At Startup Weekends and pitches, some ideas keep coming around, like: social car/taxi sharing an emergency call button app on your phone for medical help / volunteers to aid old people something to schedule sports games with your friends. Despite competent execution they rarely go mainstream. Why? Here’s an example of a social sports scheduling…

Betty Lim is planning a documentary film about Singapore’s start-up ecosystem. She asked several entrepreneurs, including me, about our life choices. Her questions set me thinking about why some of us decide to become entrepreneurs and what it means for the people close to us. As start-ups and mentors join us for our next accelerator…

Congratulations to TradeGecko, which today confirmed that it has closed a S$800k seed funding round led by WaveMaker Labs and including Golden Gate Ventures. Alongside Flocations, TradeGecko is one of two successful start-up teams from the JFDI-Innov8 2012 bootcamp raise a total S$1.5 million in the last ten days. Both teams shared the learning from…