Wisdom

The clock ticked over to a new year … so WHAT are you and your business going to do differently in 2013? ‘War stories’ from successful entrepreneurs like Derek Sivers are powerful because they can also help us figure out WHY we’re doing what we’re doing. In the first of an occasional series, Hugh Mason…

Little-known fact: the current prime minister of Singapore has a diploma in Computer Science from Cambridge University. One of our two Deputy PMs has a Masters in Computer Science (Imperial College); the other is a trained economist. So if any country can build a hi-tech ecosystem from scratch, it will be this one, writes JFDI.Asia…

You may not be able to sell data you’ve gathered about users, veteran IP guru Robert Bond of Speechly Bircham, London, tells JFDI.Asia CEO Hugh Mason. At a JFDI.Asia open house event last night Robert shared his journey from the start of the computer games era, helping software start-ups to protect their intellectual property, to…

Moonshi Mohsenruddin didn’t call it Lean Startup or Customer Discovery, but at the age of 16 he found out that talking with customers and then changing the way he packaged up T-shirts on a market stall near Singapore’s famous Lau Pa Sat hawker centre would more than double what people were happy to pay. That…

Alongside our community and the investment we put into our bootcamp startups, teaching is important for JFDI.Asia too. Our growing relationship with Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is a two-way exchange of ideas: the fresh way that undergraduate students interpret methods like Lean Startup makes us think again about issues like what actually…

One of the rites-of-passage for any new entrepreneur is being interviewed for the first time by a journalist. It can feel daunting, in terms of how you present yourself to look confident, and what to say. Making the most of the opportunity often comes down to how you frame your story, writes Hugh Mason. I…

We love ideas, but we love it even more when they get turned into sustainable, valuable businesses. It’s an exciting time to be alive because, during our lifestimes, innovation is evolving from an art into a science. Elsewhere we’ve written books and blogged about the big picture of the “Ideas Business”. Here, and in a…

We are often asked by business-trained entrepreneurs how they can attract stellar technical co-founders to realize their ideas. JFDI mentor Yvan Castilloux’ journey has taken him from co-founding a successful wifi business as CTO to an MBA at INSEAD, so he’s seen both sides of the situation. Yvan’s advice? Engaging a technical co-founder may be…

So I was cruising Facebook this weekend and someone posted a note about a new “my first email” app. I have a 6 year-old son, so we gave Maily a try. As a practical service it totally sucks – and I think that’s great. Here’s why. This is what I said to the folk at…

Back in 1877, Thomas Edison liked to chill out with his iPod, just as we do today. The phonograph was just one of 2,332 inventions that he patented in an extraordinary lifetime. The industries he created, from electric power to recorded music, generated immense wealth. His working style also pioneered many of the practices we…