Crowdonomic's blog

Yesterday was not the usual Monday, but a Mobile Monday. Does this change anything ? Of course : instead of finishing complaining about not been in week-end anymore, you can receive a fresh dose of energy and creativity ! And this session was an Open Mic one, meaning a dozen entrepreneurs and players of the mobile industry in Singapore (and Bangkok !) had 3 minutes each to pitch an idea, convince us it was a good one, and get a feedback with Q & As from the audience.

Before digging in the projects, I’d suggest anyone interested in the mobile market in South-East Asia to take a look at this detailed report from the teams of Mobile Monday. You’ll find tons of stats for every market.

Here’s a list of the more interesting projects that were discussed, would you want to check them out and know more about what’s buzzing here in Singapore. 

Fitness for Finance with FutureBooks

Anthony Coundouris (his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts) founded Future Books with this idea that Finance should go to the gym and be put on a diet. His app enhances book-keeping as you can take a picture of your receipts, send them in the cloud where they will undergo optical recognition. The objective ? No more paper in the storage room of your company! And when there won’t be any more paper in the world ? The app will allow expense and analytics tracking.

Revamping Singapore.com for the Lifestyle & Travel industry

Not much a mobile app than a big revamp of Singapore.com, a key URL for the Sunny Island, developed by Nathan Daniel Curry, and with a very modern interface, which looks a bit like Pinterest. The challenge ? Making this obvious URL a key reference for the travel industry, updating posts on lifestyle and nightlife. Definitely worth a look. 

APIs and developers. Let’s marry them on the cloud with MaShape

Chris Ismael then presented MaShape a cloud based market place to facilitate the distribution, monetization, and consumption of private and public APIs on the web. APIs providers would then be charged a fee to be connected to a community of developers playing with it. A useful tool in a growing market of interconnected devices, apps and people.

Tracking charity with DonAid

All over the world, 10th of millions of donations take place every week. By mail, by SMS, or during exhibitions and events. How to keep track of all these so as to know what comes from where in real-time ? A great tool in development to help NGOs and other organizations receving donations to be transparent about their funding, DonAid is a Donation Tracker, still under development. Check also Richard Davies profile page.

Learn better thanks gamification and Gametize

An “usual suspect” of tech conferences and events, Keith Ng (Twitter, LinkedIn) came presenting a new gamification app (after Game Maki, presented during Ideas.Inc conference). This new concept app, LearnAim, hopes to make e-learning more fun than it is by providing engaging games such as quizzes and social quests to be shared with friends.

Here’s what motivated Keith to pitch this idea : “We found that current online learning does not engage nor motivate enough, and that creating learning games is a expensive and time consuming process. Learnaim reduces not just the lead time and cost for content owners and educators to create a game, but also makes learning a lot more fun and engaging. We focus less on high fidelity graphics and more on proven game dynamics - the very same ones that keeps children and adults addicted to digital games. Learnaim, rather than replace existing LMS, is a game layer that compliments them instead”

As you know, we’re enthusiasts about these events first because it fuels creativity, networking and gives us a glance at the trending issues in our tech and digital world. You know also that as a crowdfunding start-up, we’re also looking for projects to be funded this way.

The saying wants that crowdfunding be for projects not managing to secure VCs or seed-funding. Let’s take it the other way round : many projects are community-based and hence can be eligible for a successful crowdfunding campaign. Traditional startup funding doesn’t bring the market research insight nor the pre-sales effect of crowdfunding, so both are complementary and not aimed at the same kind of projects.

Thanks The Hub for hosting and the venue and the ever-lasting networking before and after :) stay tuned for the next report on mobile innovation in Singapore

The Crowdonomic team