I had the privilege of attending the Entrepreneur 27 event on Friday at NUS to see three start-up web companies present on their companies, business models and technology - Bezurk.com, PetValley and TenCube. Pretty interesting all round - and quite a healthy crowd turn out as well. I’ll write a post each on the startups - Bezurk for today, and Pet Valley and Tencube following this. But first, a summary of what I felt about the event itself. Pictures are akan datang (coming soon) as well.

Overall, it was great and heartening to see something actually showcasing technology startups in Singapore and the innovation that’s happening. It was billed as a Web 2.0 startup showcase, although in my opinion none of the startups showcased was truly Web 2.0. Then again - five thousand people have five thousand different definitions of what “Web 2.0″ is anyway, so it shouldn’t really matter.

The other thing was that I noticed that the audience was mostly made up of students - probably due to the event being held at NUS in the first place. It was a pain getting there as well since the taxi driver didn’t know where the heck Yusof Ishak Hall is (and since I didn’t study at NUS - it made it a bit harder since I didn’t have a clue either). I felt that it would have been much better in the city - at least more industry folks would be willing to come down for the event.

I really commend the crowd though - there were many questions, and it was lively due to the smallish group that was in place (there were about 30 of us), and it definitely made for a very interesting night. I did feel though that the presenters weren’t really prepared enough to know what kind of audience they were presenting to and it made it quite hard for them. The discussions that were going on before and after were quite informative as well - and I think the students were the ones who got the most out of the experience. There weren’t any VCs in the crowd as far as I noticed though, so the startups presenting might have gotten a bit less out of it other than publicity.

Let me now go on to talk about Bezurk, and in the interest of not dragging the post for too long, i’ll leave it for the next post.

edit: Here are the photos from the event

The pre-presentation preamble

The dynamic duo of Bjorn and Justin

Posted by pallid on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 4:43 am.